About Native Americans, interbreeding and diseases...

Zioneer

Banned
Is part of the reason the South American natives survived longer on a large scale (as a distinct genetic group/culture) because they interbred with their conquerors, and thus got a genetic resistance to the European diseases? You can make fun of if I'm horribly wrong.

I know that the Plains Amerindians survived longer too, but didn't they breed a lot with Europeans?

I'm trying to think of a PoD that changes the cliche of "Native Americans get immunity to European diseases", and that's the only one I can think of.
 
It's mostly because the Spanish maintained the old Inca structure for the most part - just with them on top. The Inca nobility for the most part (to my knowledge) just adopted Spanish titles of nobility and kept their lands. They intermarried with the Spaniards though the commoners generally didn't. That and the population was rather large compared to say to those of the Natives in the East Coast of North America who were even more primitive and smaller in population.
 
I don't think you understand this:

The Native Americans bred with the conquerors (as you put it) after the Smallpox killed their leaders and many of them. Heck, the women who now slept with Spaniards fell prey to diseases as well. Their children also had a 50/50 chance of inheriting Genetic resistance, if the Said Spaniard even had resistance (not all resistence is Genetic).
In the Native's eyes, the conquerors were demonic gods who came when their family and friends were dying. The only choice you'd have was to appease these gods, convert to their religion, and (perhaps) sleep with them.
 

Zioneer

Banned
I don't think you understand this:

The Native Americans bred with the conquerors (as you put it) after the Smallpox killed their leaders and many of them. Heck, the women who now slept with Spaniards fell prey to diseases as well. Their children also had a 50/50 chance of inheriting Genetic resistance, if the Said Spaniard even had resistance (not all resistence is Genetic).
In the Native's eyes, the conquerors were demonic gods who came when their family and friends were dying. The only choice you'd have was to appease these gods, convert to their religion, and (perhaps) sleep with them.

I'm guessing the Plains Amerindians and such didn't do so because there was simply so much more room to avoid the Europeans, until it was too late?
 
I'm guessing the Plains Amerindians and such didn't do so because there was simply so much more room to avoid the Europeans, until it was too late?

Those lands were not really desirable by Europeans until the 1800s. Plus it's not to say the Plains Amerindians were not affected because they were or shall I point out the introduction of the horse and gunpowder weapons and their effect in changing their entire way of life especially their hunting habits.
 

Zioneer

Banned
Those lands were not really desirable by Europeans until the 1800s. Plus it's not to say the Plains Amerindians were not affected because they were or shall I point out the introduction of the horse and gunpowder weapons and their effect in changing their entire way of life especially their hunting habits.

Okay, that makes things more clear. Thanks.
 
I don't think you understand this:

The Native Americans bred with the conquerors (as you put it) after the Smallpox killed their leaders and many of them. Heck, the women who now slept with Spaniards fell prey to diseases as well. Their children also had a 50/50 chance of inheriting Genetic resistance, if the Said Spaniard even had resistance (not all resistence is Genetic).
In the Native's eyes, the conquerors were demonic gods who came when their family and friends were dying. The only choice you'd have was to appease these gods, convert to their religion, and (perhaps) sleep with them.

Natives never saw the Spaniards as gods, just strange looking assholes that were too strong to resist in the end.
 
The reasons why more indigenous peoples survived in Latin America than in North America is because:

A.) There were more Latin American indigenous people in the first place. Mesoamerica and the Andes were urbanized, state-level societies that could support much larger populations than the subsistence-farming villages and chiefdoms of North America.

B.) As settler destinations, the colonies of British America received a lot more families to replace the disrupted native populations. Spanish America received mostly men, forcing them to look to the indigenous women for wives.
 
Genetic resistance was probably a relatively minor factor in the difference between European resistance to disease and American Indian resistance to them in most cases. Smallpox tended to kill around 40-50% of people who got it, while several others among the big killers typically got 30-40%. That was true of Europeans as well as pretty much everyone else. There were differences at the margins, but European populations where no one was immune could get hit hard (Iceland-smallpox, 40-50% dead, for example).

The big differences between Europeans and Indians were that (a) Europeans for the most part got smallpox and most of the other major crowd diseases early in life. They died in heaps as little kids, but most adults were immune. (b) As a result of (a), even when adult Europeans got smallpox, measles, etc, got smallpox they rarely all or almost all got sick at the same time, which meant that they had people to care for them, feed them and do any necessary work. Indian epidemics tended to include deaths from starvation/dehydration/hypothermia because everybody in the community was sick. (c) Diseases tended to develop more deadly strains when they got among Indian populations because they could. In Europe, if a strain of say smallpox was too deadly it killed off its host before it could jump to another host because most people were immune. Among Indian populations, no one was immune so running out of hosts wasn't a problem for the disease in the short term and the more deadly strains tended to become more common.
 
There were some genetic and cultural things that made the Indians worse off. (a) Indian populations tended to be more genetically alike at the village level, which meant that a disease that adapted to one body was more adapted to the next victim. It's possible (though I've never seen it studied) that part of the reason the Navaho population grew from about 4000 to 210,000 was that they incorporated a fair sized number of Pueblo Indians of an entirely different blood group, ending up with a lot of genetic diversity. (b) Indian diets among the larger and more settled populations were generally barely adequate nutritionally, and in times of stress--pregnancy or fighting off a disease, they tipped into deficiency. Large Indian populations outside the Great Plains and the Andes tended to live on a diet of mainly corn and beans with little animal-based nutrition--few or no domestic animals and a large enough populations to make game animals locally scarce.
 
Where genetics really did make a difference was with malaria, but the advantages were more to Africans than for Europeans. BTW, that's important because were malaria became a factor Indian cultures tended to get smashed even more flat than usual. Malaria spread pretty widely in the America Southeast and persisted until the 1900s. Surviving cultures tended to be centered around mountainous or dry areas, places that were kind of backwaters normally.
 
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