I'd wait on peer review for this one. It seems a little hasty to interpret the results of a MRCA of modern smallpox as that being its first ever instance. It sounds like it could be a bottleneck.I'm resurrecting this thread because I just read that smallpox may have first emerged in human populations in the mid-16th century, see this report. From the discussion section of the report:
The most distinctive physical manifestation of smallpox—the pustular rash—has supposedly “definitive” reports in 4th century China, with suggestions that it was present in ancient Egypt and India over 3,500 years ago, although in reality it is difficult to distinguish smallpox from chickenpox or measles using historical records alone. Such a discordance between inferred molecular-clock dates and retrospective analyses suggests that if they were indeed due to smallpox, these early cases were caused by virus lineages that were no longer circulating at the point of eradication in the 1970s. Conversely, others have suggested that there is little compelling evidence for epidemic and/or virulent (i.e., high-mortality) smallpox in Europe prior to the 16th century, close to our inferred date for the ancestry of VARV. For example, the bills of mortality, the best-known mortality records for Europe at that time, provide the first clear evidence for severe smallpox in London in 1632, shortly before several major European and western Asian epidemics took hold and most likely infected the Lithuanian child studied here.
This obviously causes a problem, considering that the 1520 epidemic is generally considered to be smallpox, based on admittedly rather imprecise descriptions of the symptoms. Measles does look rather similar to smallpox in their early stages, and can have a similar 30% virgin-field mortality rate, so perhaps the great 1520 mortality was due to measles instead of smallpox.
Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.Personally, I don't believe it was indigenous. I've read some accounts written by physicians at the time, and what struck me was not only how they reported that Europeans of all types were almost untouched, but that Africans were much lighter hit than natives. Although still heavier than Europeans. I don't think the Africans had any advantages on the natives in terms of living conditions. To me, that sounds like something from Europe, possibly with a new reservoir or mutation.
This question could be best answered by someone from /r/AskHistorians, if anyone wants to go there.
I'd wait on peer review for this one. It seems a little hasty to interpret the results of a MRCA of modern smallpox as that being its first ever instance. It sounds like it could be a bottleneck.
Furthermore, as disease-ridden Europe was I don't trust their pathological knowledge. They may not have differentiated smallpox strains from that of measles or similar diseases. I'm gonna need to see more conclusions by other researchers in order to overturn all our previous patho-historical knowledge.
Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistori...were_cocoliztli_and_matlazahuatl_and_how_did/
It's almost definitely an indigenous disease, as there is no evidence of any similar disease in Europe or Africa at the time. Furthermore, all reports of the disease came from Mesoamerica's interior; if it came from the Old World it would appear not only there, but along the path of the Spaniards such as Mexico's Gulf Coast or the islands. From the descriptions of the disease it appears to be some kind of hantavirus or arenavirus, of which there are many in the Americas and are commonly carried by the native rodents, especially cotton rats. While we can't agree or identify the specific pathogen that caused cocoliztli, the consensus among historians is it's indeed endemic to Mesoamerica, and the epidemics recorded were caused by a drought that forced the rodents into pockets of water shared by humans.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/4/01-0175_article
User @yboxman, who is a cell biologist, made a nice post about diseases and immune systems in his Viking TL some time back. He could explain it better than I can.I have a question. If that is the case, shouldn't that mean that the whites should have been more devastated by the native disease, because they would not have any immunity at all, compared to natives, who would have at least some immunity? I'm reminded that in Africa, the Europeans were held back from colonizing the interior because of the disease environment of the African Interior. Sure those diseases devastated Africans too, but it devastated the Europeans so much more that it was impossible to colonize it until the 19th century when quinine was developed, and Europeans were not nicer to Africans on the coasts than they were to Native Americans. And it did not lead to population crashes among the native Africans than the colonizing Europeans.
If it was indigenous, and it was endemic, then it should be like the recurring waves of Black Death and Smallpox in Europe and China during the early modern period. It should affect only the children, since all the adults contacted it when they were children, and either died or survived and became immune as a result, thus relegating it to childhood diseases over time. And it should affect arriving foreigners (Europeans) much more severely than natives.
Instead, it devastated adults and children alike, crashed the population so hard like a virgin epidemic would, and seemingly did not affect the population of Europeans.
Basically, to me, the population decrease in the Americans seemed more consistent with a disease that the Natives had never been exposed too before, and that the Europeans had immunity to it.
Tons of Europeans were affected by cocoliztli. The thing is in the 1500s there were a lot more natives in Mesoamerica than there were Spaniards, who mostly lived in well-off urban areas insulated from the rural farmlands which would be home to the disease-spreading rodents. Eventually it did reach the Spaniards and start killing them.
t's almost definitely an indigenous disease, as there is no evidence of any similar disease in Europe or Africa at the time.
Furthermore, all reports of the disease came from Mesoamerica's interior; if it came from the Old World it would appear not only there, but along the path of the Spaniards such as Mexico's Gulf Coast or the islands.
As far as the biology of it goes, basically Yboxman's post says that people that have had a history of infectious diseases have the ability to better fight new ones, even if they've never been exposed. So the Spaniards already had an immune advantage regardless of what Mesoamerica had to offer. They still got sick, though, once the disease finally reached their way.
From the descriptions of the disease it appears to be some kind of hantavirus or arenavirus, of which there are many in the Americas and are commonly carried by the native rodents, especially cotton rats. While we can't agree or identify the specific pathogen that caused cocoliztli, the consensus among historians is it's indeed endemic to Mesoamerica, and the epidemics recorded were caused by a drought that forced the rodents into pockets of water shared by humans.
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.
You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.
You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.
As someone said before here, the deaths from disease cannot be separated from European mistreatment. The disruption of native american society was one of the things that caused the plagues in the first place.
You need native labour, you capture the natives, they live close to you, they catch your diseases.
Here is a good point, in most cases. The overall collapse of Mississippian civilisation is independent from their treatment by Europeans. There were few Europeans in North America before de Soto's expedition where he and his men gave witness to the fall of North America's most vibrant indigenous civilisation. It has more to do with trade networks in the Caribbean, where the diseases existed thanks to the Spanish colonisation, which spread the epidemics to North America. Considering the minimal interaction Europe had with North America before the 17th century, outside of abortive attempts at missions, we can't really blame Europeans there, and certainly not the mistreatment of natives, for the spread of epidemics there.
What European interference did was make things far, far worse, where it was most prominent, like in Latin America. If the Andeans or Mesoamericans hadn't been as brutalised by Europeans in the form of slavery and what was basically slavery, I don't think they would've died in such numbers. Smallpox (let's just call it smallpox, regardless of what this thread of current research is saying) and other disease (it wasn't simply smallpox of course, but a host of Old World diseases) would wreck the American Indians regardless of what was done to them. But the difference between, say, 60% of people dying and 80% dying is huge. When the Spanish fed the locals into the mines like Potosí and subjected them to brutal conditions of labor, they helped make the inevitable epidemics far, far worse than it had to be. It still would be destabilising to local societies. But it was made far worse than it had to be.
I think the evidence shows that Spanish/Portuguese interference in the New World was by far the most destructive, whereas England/France (and the United States) simply finished them off. Locals had little resistance to European diseases, as late as the 19th century. It's noteworthy that when the Sioux were vaccinated against smallpox by a US government mission to vaccinate American Indians, that they were able to gain a huge advantage against other groups who were unvaccinated (because Congressional funding ran out) like the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Pawnee in large part because of this.
Overall, I'm still convinced that the majority of native deaths were because of European diseases rather than any specific acts of Europeans. But Europeans (especially Spain) helped contribute to the diseases being so brutal thanks to their own brutal treatment of the natives. But in the end, it's a fallacy to blame Europeans for the majority of American Indian death, at least in terms of direct mistreatment. The majority was due to disease, the rest is probably evenly split between Euroamerican-related violence (Indian Wars) and American Indian groups fighting amongst each due to the technologies and opportunities brought to them by Europeans. All of this contributed to make the 19th century Great Plains one of the most violent places on Earth thanks to the amount of conflict between various American Indian groups and Euroamericans.
I would separate Spain from Portugal.
Spain was more disruptive and destructive for the mere reason that it grabbed the most populated, richest and most structured areas of the Americas : the aztec and inca empires.
Portugal and Britain grabbed far less densely populated areas, so the disruption they caused seems less cataclysmic in a relative perspective.
France was an other story : It took a much more collaborative path dealing with the amerindians. And although It was partly due to the weak number of french settlers, It was probably not the only reason. I guess the mobile nature of fur trade also makes it more necessary to get on decently with natives than a kind of colonization based on grabbing lands and mineral resources.
I guess any other power grabbing the aztec and inca empire would have behaved quite the same way as the spanish did and have produced quite the same catastrophic results.