Introducing European Disease To The Americas

Okay, so, I think it can be agreed that one of the biggest helps to European conquest of the Americas were the plagues they brought with them that completely wiped out most of the native populations.

So, let's say some Basque fishermen or your discoverer-of-the-Americas of choice somehow with every disease which OTL fucked over the natives comes into contact with natives, spreads the disease to them, and the disease is somehow miraculously spread to all of the native populations of the New World some hundred years before Columbus sets foot in the Caribbean. It does it's thing and wipes out societies and cultures leaving only a handful of natives alive.

A few things, now

A. What's the earliest something like this could happen
B. How long would it take for the natives to recover, number wise and societal organization wise?
C. How long would it take for the diseases in Europe to mutate and be far enough removed from the diseases introduced to the natives so that it wipes them out all over again?
D. Would natives naturally lose their immunity to European diseases even without the diseases mutating? Give them three hundred years, and could they be vulnerable all over again?
 
A. If the Norse had brought the plague to Vinland, the natives would have had a half-millenium to build of an immunity. That's a best case scenario from OTL, though, with a few changes, Phoenician sailors could have been blown off course to the Caribbean. This is all up to the author.

B. I'm not an expert, but I suggest looking at the population numbers related to the epidemics experienced by Rome and China from the 2nd century onwards. Rome's population's fell from at least 65 million in ~150 AD to ~40 million in 400 AD; Europe would not reach that level again until several centuries later in the High Middle Ages. So, numbers wise, several centuries. Civilization wise, that's subjective to the writer, as history gives us a very limited number of examples to work from.

C. I'm not an epidemiologist, so this is complete guesswork. But considering the rate at which bacteria evolve, it may only take a few generations.

D. No idea.
 
B. The big thing issue here, I think, is social organization. In pre-Industrial societies, population tends to rise to carrying capacity and then level off, and carrying capacity of a given chunk of land depends on tech level and social organization. Europe's population collapsed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire because of the loss of access to imported Egyptian grain and the breakdown of social order, and only recovered when things became organized enough for food production to recover and surpass Roman levels.

OTL, entire cultures (the Mississippi Mound Builders are a classic example) were wiped out by the Columbian plagues without ever meeting a European, leaving scattered survivors of agrarian civilization to revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. That sort of thing will take an awfully long time to recover from.

D. Yes, probably. To keep a disease circulating, you need either a natural reservoir (usually an animal population that can incubate and transmit the disease without being wiped out by it) or a large enough population of non-immune humans for the disease to keep circulating at low levels (e.g. measles as a childhood disease). After something like the Columbian plagues, with something like 90% of the population wiped out, societies breaking down, and most of the survivors with acquired immunity, the latter is unlikely. And there were very few domesticated animals in the pre-Columbian Americas, limiting good options for natural reservoirs.

It does depend on the disease, though. Endemic bubonic fever would likely establish itself among the wild rodent population as per OTL, influenza could easily establish itself among wild birds, and the common cold is a good candidate to become an endemic human disease, but measles and smallpox are probably one-and-done plagues.

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For your intended goal, I'd suggest a series of small-scale contacts, each introducing one or two diseases. A big part of why the Columbian plagues were so devastating was multiple diseases arriving simultaneously, with a wave of smallpox passing through and killing half of the population, then a few months later measles shows up and kills half of the survivors. Space the plagues out and give the population time to recover between them, and they'll act more like OTL European plagues: horrific from a human perspective, but not society-killing like the Columbian plagues.
 
A) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_contact

Pick a POD and run with it.

C) Not very long at all. Within a lifetime. In fact, just a few short years. The best recorded region in this regard was Mesoamerica after the Spanish conquest of the Mexica. The former empire and the surrounding territories were wrecked, and I mean wrecked, by concessive waves of several different diseases which decimated the population; death-rates were regularly reported about 50% and sometimes up to 90% :eek:

The issue at hand though isn't the diseases themselves; its the natives total lack of immunity. To put it simply due to the circumstances of their very existence the native peoples of America don't have the ability to resist Eurasian diseases at the genetic level. For a more in-depth answer I suggest reading through this thread I posted when I first arrived to this community.

I also suggesting reading both 1491 and Guns, Germs, and Steel for even more information on the topic.
 
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