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American diseases wouldn't consistently do so either. Only the initial voyages would suffer high death rates, after that people would be immune. It might be written up to the first expeditions having bad luck. Well, for my little extrapolation I postulated a 70% death rate. Wikipedia tells me...

Yeah, but malaria didn't stop all trade with Africa, did it? And once the initial exposures are over the death rate in transAtlantic sailors would drop off dramatically. They might figure that, then again the people in charge might not. They might say something like "correlation isn't...

I think 95% in the Americas was the cumulative death toll from a number of different diseases. So one might wipe out 1/3 of the population, a second might wipe out another 1/3 etc.. Less a single super-plague and more, like I said, imagine being hit by two or three Black Deaths in quick...

What I'm thinking is the big danger would be healthy carriers. Some guys go over to the Americas, catch something nasty, half of them die, the other half survive and are immunized but a couple of them are still carrying the disease, like OTL Typhoid Mary. They go back to Europe, infect others...

Well, one way to do it might be to somehow get the Mongol Empire to last long-term. They could then preside over an industrial revolution hundreds of years later, when conditions have become more favorable for it. Don't know how plausible that is though.

Another bit I felt inspired to do: From The Great Dying: A History of the Plague Years, by Scholar Wang Du, Fuzhou University The sheer scale of the plagues can be appreciated by comparing estimates of the global population at the beginning and the end of the Century of Tears. According to a...

Well, I'm thinking what happened here is one of the first ships came back carrying some guys who'd caught something really nasty, survived, but became carriers. All it might take is one of those to touch off a massive epidemic. If they don't stop the voyages I could see that happening multiple...

I felt inspired to do a very little creative writing take-off of this: From Chronicle of the Life of Emperor Sakwa II, historian Sagada of the Misi-Ziibi Empire[1] That year a Spanish ship called at Nayatik[2]. Today the inhabitants of that city have become accustomed to these barbarians...

Offhand, I can see two possible ways for this to happen: 1) A dictatorship that surpresses any discussion of evolution for ideological or political reasons. 2) A very different fossil record that does not apparently support evolution. I could see this happening on, say, a terraformed planet...

Inspired by a thought I had while looking at another discussion: I thought this would make an interesting what-if scenario, anybody want to take a shot at it? I can easily imagine the development of civilization in general being set back centuries by something like that. Would the (native)...

Am I the only one who gets the impression the OP is supposed to be a DBWI from a timeline where the Green Sahara never dried up?