After the discovery of the Americas by Europeans, Old World diseases ravaged much of the Native population, killing as many as 90%. However, it is worth noting that much of this was exacerbated by the conditions that they were put into by Europeans. If such exploitation did not occur, what is the lowest possible death toll considering the diseases that were brought over and the vulnerability the natives had for these diseases?
Lowest possible death toll of Old World diseases in the New World
- Thread starter JSilvy
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A lot of it was unavoidable, based on the insufficient immune systems of the natives. Disease was going to sweep through and destroy a huge amount of their population.
Some of it was exacerbated by cultural practices, of which the most notorious is the sweat lodge which they used for healing. Heating up in a crowded sweat lodge while sick and diving into cold water is pretty much lethal. One example of this is the malaria outbreak in the Lower Columbia/Willamette Valley during the 1830s/early 1840s which in 15 years essentially destroyed the Chinookans and Kalapuyans (combined with measles and smallpox, each ethnic group lost over 90% of their population compared to estimated pre-contact levels) and depopulated one of the most densely populated parts of indigenous America (similar malaria epidemics also struck in California but were less severe). Malaria, yellow fever, and other mosquito borne illnesses also helped destroy Amazonian, Caribbean, and Southeastern US Amerindian peoples.
However, there is one cultural tradition which might provide defense against this, and that is prophets and powerful shamans arising to preach a message that changes society. One of these prophets could preach something about the sweat lodge that regulates its use. The introduction of malaria to the PNW is one of the best attested cases of malaria being introduced to an immunologically naive region (alongside Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius in the 18th century and archaeological studies of Sardinia in Antiquity) so we can assume that given enough time, cultures will adapt.
This is definitely easier if European exploitation is less bad, since wars against Europeans (or their native proxies) makes things even worse in terms of recovering from epidemics which will be inevitable. Things like runaway African slaves or European mercenaries/traders mixing with the natives (like the Portuguese prazeiros in Africa or traders in the Creek nation) adds immunity and new technological concepts, including perhaps the concept of inoculation.
I think 65-70% death is likely over successive epidemics, and then perhaps a generation of "bottoming out" and a slow rise back to normal.
Some of it was exacerbated by cultural practices, of which the most notorious is the sweat lodge which they used for healing. Heating up in a crowded sweat lodge while sick and diving into cold water is pretty much lethal. One example of this is the malaria outbreak in the Lower Columbia/Willamette Valley during the 1830s/early 1840s which in 15 years essentially destroyed the Chinookans and Kalapuyans (combined with measles and smallpox, each ethnic group lost over 90% of their population compared to estimated pre-contact levels) and depopulated one of the most densely populated parts of indigenous America (similar malaria epidemics also struck in California but were less severe). Malaria, yellow fever, and other mosquito borne illnesses also helped destroy Amazonian, Caribbean, and Southeastern US Amerindian peoples.
However, there is one cultural tradition which might provide defense against this, and that is prophets and powerful shamans arising to preach a message that changes society. One of these prophets could preach something about the sweat lodge that regulates its use. The introduction of malaria to the PNW is one of the best attested cases of malaria being introduced to an immunologically naive region (alongside Indian Ocean islands like Mauritius in the 18th century and archaeological studies of Sardinia in Antiquity) so we can assume that given enough time, cultures will adapt.
This is definitely easier if European exploitation is less bad, since wars against Europeans (or their native proxies) makes things even worse in terms of recovering from epidemics which will be inevitable. Things like runaway African slaves or European mercenaries/traders mixing with the natives (like the Portuguese prazeiros in Africa or traders in the Creek nation) adds immunity and new technological concepts, including perhaps the concept of inoculation.
I think 65-70% death is likely over successive epidemics, and then perhaps a generation of "bottoming out" and a slow rise back to normal.
Lusitania
Donor
People regardless if Europeans or natives had no idea how diseases were transmitted. This is especially true in the pre 1800 era. Someone selling a contaminated blanket or sick person visiting a new area and coming in contact with native groups leads to the spread of diseases. Most Europeans though diseases were a sign from god of a persons misdeeds. Therefore any contact will bring disease and war.
That being said if Inca had resisted the Spanish and held them off their numbers could of been less. Eventually disease will ravage the Inca too
That being said if Inca had resisted the Spanish and held them off their numbers could of been less. Eventually disease will ravage the Inca too
There is absolutely no hard evidence for this; it's based primarily on "macrohistorical" speculation and a crude argument from incredulity. Much more likely is that Old World diseases had a huge death toll in the New World because of their sudden appearance and the rapid societal collapse they entailed.
For rough analogues, see the 1918 Spanish Flu and the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemics.
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That unfortunately doesn't appear to be true. Amerindians still have a worse time with a number of diseases today, and I don't just mean diseases of poverty. The population bottleneck that natives went through, both in coming to the Americas and then when disease hit left them highly susceptible to diseases. There's been some research coming out of University of Illinois that indicates that the initial wave of diseases caused a huge drop in the presence of genes to determine healthy vs invaded cells. Then there's the unfortunate fact that we're not talking about just one disease, we're talking about dozens. If you survive smallpox you still have malaria, or TB, or Typhus, the flu, typhoid, yellow fever, whooping cough, and so on. At a certain point, you're so immunocomprimised from a succession of diseases that things like the cold can become deadly. Of course this is also simply ignoring the very real possibility of catching two or more diseases at once...
Unless contact is somehow pushed back to the vaccination era, there's just not anyway around a huge loss of life in the Americas. That number might be 50% or it might be 90%, but a significant loss of life is unfortunately inevitable.
Yes, this is part of what I was referring to with "sudden appearance". A more moderate process of colonisation (for example, with the Americas being discovered earlier, say in the fourteenth century; or indeed slightly later, via Newfoundland and Brazil rather than the Caribbean) would have staggered these diseases' transmission among the population and substantially reduced the astonishing death rate, which as you correctly note is entirely attributable to a cascading effect rather than any innate "weak immune system" among indigenous Americans - which asserting is a pretty short hop from scientific racism*.
Was there going to be a significant death toll for indigenous Americans from the point of contact onward? Probably, yes. Could it have been offset, given certain PoDs, to the point of keeping indigenous American lifeways continuously viable? Almost certainly. Considering the spectacular collapse of the Mesoamerican and Inca states, due essentially to luck, and several more gradual lucky breaks in European colonisation on the seaboards, I'm confident in saying we live in one of the worst possible timelines for indigenous American societies. And a death toll of 50% rather than 75-90% would have made for a hell of a difference in subsequent history.
*I am not accusing anyone in this thread, or anyone in particular who speculates on "innate" disadvantages of indigenous Americans' immune systems, of racism. I'm only saying that any claim of an "innate" disadvantage among a racial group requires extraordinary and reliable evidence, which advocates generally don't produce.
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The issue is that disease transmission often was staggered. To give an example, smallpox arrived in the Caribbean pretty much at contact and killed close to 50/60% of the populace within a decade. Measles then arrived 1530ish and killed another 60ish% of the survivors. The spread westward is another example, tribes on the West Coast didn't get hit with epidemics until the late 1700's when Europeans arrived there. Unless you slow contact dramatically down, It doesn't really matter how slowly Europeans arrive on the continent, the waves of diseases will still hit one after another or all at once. It should also be noted that Smallpox killed ~30% of those infected in the Old World, in the Americas where there is no preexisting immunity it meant that people of all ages contracted the virus which dramatically increased the death toll since there were then less adults to take care of the infected.
The other issue is that Amerindians had an incredibly small founder population, we're talking an estimated effective population of less than 80. That is an absolutely massive population bottleneck, and it has resulted in significantly less genetic diversity in the Americas than anywhere else in the world. That's not a recipe for great ability of a population to resist diseases. As I mentioned in my first comment too, the introduction of diseases to the Americas seems to have further changed the genetic landscape of the survivors, which leads to indigenous Americans having a higher mortality rate to some diseases to this day. Now over a long enough time span that isn't an issue, Amerindians have dramatically better survival rates today than they did 200 years ago, and modern medicine is only partly to thank for that, but there really isn't much escaping a precipitous drop in population. The population can recover with some respite and the survivors will be more resistant to diseases in the future, but its very hard to get that respite in the first place.
Native Americans were hit by several pandemics at once or in short succession, not by single disease, and were in constant contact with much more immune Europeans and Africans. Population of Mexico was steadly falling until second half of 17th century, for 150 years after Spanish conquest.
What exactly is the question here?
Smallest absolute number of deaths from "Old World" diseases?
Or least aggregate demographic impact on New World populations?
Because ISTM that these would be two different answers.
Suppose contact between the continents was limited and intermittent, It's possible that various Old World diseases would be introduced separately, over hundreds of years. Old World livestock might also be introduced in a small way, perhaps by failed colonies, and then spreading over the continent (and with them, zoonotic diseases, also ecological disruption). Each such introduction would have a demographic impact, followed by recovery. At the end of the process, the New World native population could be nearly the same as before contact. This would be minimum demographic impact.
However, since each successive introduction would be striking an undiminished or little diminished population, the number of deaths would be very large.
This number could be larger than in OTL, where several Old World diseases were introduced simultaneously, in multiple areas, by sustained contacts.
Smallest absolute number of deaths from "Old World" diseases?
Or least aggregate demographic impact on New World populations?
Because ISTM that these would be two different answers.
Suppose contact between the continents was limited and intermittent, It's possible that various Old World diseases would be introduced separately, over hundreds of years. Old World livestock might also be introduced in a small way, perhaps by failed colonies, and then spreading over the continent (and with them, zoonotic diseases, also ecological disruption). Each such introduction would have a demographic impact, followed by recovery. At the end of the process, the New World native population could be nearly the same as before contact. This would be minimum demographic impact.
However, since each successive introduction would be striking an undiminished or little diminished population, the number of deaths would be very large.
This number could be larger than in OTL, where several Old World diseases were introduced simultaneously, in multiple areas, by sustained contacts.
I really wonder how that could have been possible, 80 people would mean so much inbreeding. In any case I'm not sure how relevant it is 10-15 thousand years afterwards, by analogy the bottleneck in Eurasia of 8 or so thousand people was probably irrelevant 50 thousand or so years afterwards, I guess the scale is different but in of itself it's not self-evident that the bottleneck would have been particularly relevant by the early modern period.
What nonsense. Having a less active immune system doesn't make you inferior, it just means your immune system is adapted to an environment with less disease threats. In those kinds of environments, having a very active immune system is a disadvantage, it gives you autoimmune disorders without much benefit. What is helpful in one environment can be deadly in another. That is all.
You need to break yourself out of the racialism mindset that biology can be meaningfully interpreted in terms of essentialist superiority and inferiority. That mindset is a product of some very crude versions of Darwinian evolution.
I mentioned the Kalapuyans and Chinookans, they were immunologically naive to malaria and suffered severely from outbreaks that utterly decimated them, more or less the same as populations immunologically naive to malaria were elsewhere as attested in history. This includes cultural aspects on how to treat malaria, which needs to be learned/culturally evolved (as it was in the ancient Mediterranean in areas like Sardinia where malaria was introduced relatively late). So if it isn't entirely genetic, there's a real cultural aspect to it too, and the cures attributed to sweat lodges are utterly counterproductive if you bring a sick person suffering from a high fever into a sweat lodge surrounded by other people and then encourage them to jump into frigid water. This epidemic was after a few earlier epidemics at the end of the 18th/early 19th century brought from other parts of indigenous America or by early European contacts, and was pretty much over when serious colonisation of the area began.
I'm not convinced societal collapse is truly a factor everywhere. Sure, the early 16th century Southeast US had a major drought and in parts was centuries into a pre-existing societal collapse that was triggering waves of migration south, but you can't say the same for everywhere. It's more than just circumstantial evidence I think. I can't recall if it was in reference to California or Oregon (Willamette/Lower Columbia), but an American official noted how lucky they were that the natives had more or less died off by the time colonisation arrived in full and they never needed to fight a major war against the natives since they knew it would've been an expensive campaign.
From everything I've read, the problem is multifold, being a mix of a small founding population leading to poor genetics, a reduced disease environment compared to the Old World, repeated plagues and new plagues at that hitting over and over, and societal disruption from drought/Little Ice Age. It occurs in isolated peoples from Iceland to Hawaii to the Americas to Australia.
Ethnicity has nothing to do with this, lack of exposure to the diseases has everything. Just look at the Norse descended Faroe Islanders when measles landed, or even the recurrences of Bubonic Plague in Europe whenever a new generation was available to infect. Without some pre-Columbian Exchange POD the old world diseases are still going to produce an immense die off. Even with such a POD there would still be an immense die off from each separate exposure and if the POD was far in the past and the disease(s) in question did not become endemic there would still be a major die-off with the exchange. And I believe that outside of MesoAmerica, Incadom, and possible a few other centers the community densities in America were not sufficient for infectious diseases to become endemic.
Deleted member 142663
Pretty Much. For instance, If the Natives were more advanced and urban, the likely consequence would not necessarily be that they better survived ‘Old World’ diseases but they might have developed some agricultural diseases of their own that might have decimated the old world as well.
Imagine if the result of contact had been 90% die offs on both sides of the Atlantic. That probably works to the Native’s advantage. And forever changes the narrative of the Americas in Europe.
Are there any good stories about a mass mutual plague die-off? Nearest I can think of is from LoRaG and that doesn't really count.
Optical_Illusion
Banned
When people talk about 80 people in these sort of contexts, it does probably tend to refer more to "adults of reproductive age who reproduced" - the actual population size could be a little bigger including elder people past reproductive age, children and young adults who died without reproducing, etc.
80 people is not actually that small compared with some bottlenecks we know about in human history; Ashkenazi Jews seem to descend from a community of 300 (https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1006644 - "effective size ≈300 around 30 generations ago" / https://www.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-descend-from-350-people-study-finds/ - "(The founding population) lived in the medieval era, about 600 to 800 years ago, according to the analysis – and numbered just 350 or so people.") and the effects are relatively slight. There are a lot of groups in South Asia that seem to have much more intense founding effects than this - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5675555/ - "We identify 81 unique groups, of which 14 have estimated census sizes of more than a million, that descend from founder events more extreme than those in Ashkenazi Jews and Finns, both of which have high rates of recessive disease due to founder events.".
The largest degree of reduction in population size that seems to have been detected so far is in the repopulation of Ireland after the Last Glacial Maximum (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2378-6 - "To our knowledge, Irish hunter-gatherers also exhibit the largest degree of short runs of homozygosity (Fig. 3b) described for any ancient—or indeed modern—genome, a signature of ancestral constriction that supports a prolonged period of island isolation.") But this populations still survived and "it appears Irish hunter-gatherers were capable of sustaining outbreeding networks within the island itself despite the estimated carrying capacity of only 3,000–10,000 individuals" (no actual recent inbreeding found for them!). However, this is just the smallest effect for Homo Sapiens. Neanderthals and Denisovans survived for hundreds of thousands of years with even smaller founding populations.
So long as direct, recent inbreeding is avoided, and those really long runs of homozygosity that cause disease are broken up, humans seem surprisingly robust to fairly small founding populations.
That said, I don't know about the idea of MHC collapse from small founding populations, and that then having an effect later on vulnerability to disease. Could be tested more with a lot of these populations like those from India that descend from very small founding numbers. The more plausible variations of these ideas tend to involve the idea of a Siberian filter where the initial population of the Americas didn't carry many of the diseases that circulate within humans, so constraint was relaxed, together with some positive selection against immune response for weaker auto-immune diseases... Still I don't know how plausible that is when plenty of wildlife in Americas should be a reserve of zoonotic diseases.... This idea of low MHC diversity in the Americas could be tested more.