LogFAQs > #932976695

Nichtcrawler X posted...

Did Columbus not arrive in the aftermath of that pandemic?

That epidemic was entirely rooted in diseases that the Spaniards brought over from Europe, that the natives had no real resistance to. The general assumption is that smallpox is the one that did the most damage, though measles might have been a close second. In return, they gave Europe syphilis.

Basically, the Spanish in the Central and South American areas passed diseases to the natives by interacting with them, who then spread it to their neighbors, who spread it to their neighbors, who spread it to their neighbors, and so on, until it crossed the entire continent and affected places the Europeans had never seen.

By the time the British, French, Dutch, and others started establishing colonies a hundred years later, they were showing up in places that had already been annihilated by disease. Which made it a lot easier to establish footholds because there was no one left to fight them over the land (and a lot of the land was already cleared and previously cultivated, which made it easier to establish farms and towns than it would have been in complete wilderness). And, of course, the new settlers wound up passing their diseases on to natives they met, so the cycle continued.

It's similar to what happened when the Mongols started pushing west into what is present-day Crimea. They brought disease from Asia with them, that people in Asia had built up resistances to from centuries worth of regular exposure, but they were passing it to Europeans who have never caught those diseases, and never built up immunity, and thus, the Black Death winds up rolling across Europe and killing off half the population (about 100 million). A lot of disease got passed around Europe, Asia, and Africa that way (mostly through trade routes) over thousands of years, which is why there's always examples of minor plagues here and there, or more major outbreaks (like the Plague of Justinian or the one that hit England just before the Great Fire of London in 1666). But that constant ebb and flow strengthened immune systems against those diseases in general, so there usually wasn't a huge catastrophic outbreak (except for the Black Death).

People in the Americas had never had that contact, so they were exceptionally susceptible to those diseases, and something like 90% of the population (around 40 million people) died from them. Which completely disrupted their entire way of life, and radically changed the future of the world. In an alternate universe where the natives don't get sick, European colonization would be much, much more difficult (if it could succeed at all). In fact, this may be WHY the Vikings didn't colonize North America - they were facing the full strength of the natives, and lacked the guns the later colonizers brought with them.

Ironically, the fact that the American natives killed off most of the megafauna when they first arrived from Asia (which meant there were fewer species to domesticate once they settled down into agricultural civilizations, which in turn meant they didn't catch diseases from the animals, which meant their immune systems were weaker, and which meant the diseases they gave to the Europeans weren't as potent) helped play a role in their downfall. In an alternate universe where American natives had domesticated dozens of species and developed hundreds of unique diseases of their own, the Colombian Exchange potentially sets off sweeping lethal infection that devastates Europe, Asia, and Africa (though possibly not, because the long trip across the sea could potentially be long enough to prevent anyone infected from managing to get back to Europe alive). If if happened, the likely outcome there is that colonization becomes both impossible and unwanted, and by the time Europe recovered enough to begin another attempt at colonization the civilizations of the Americas would have recovered as well, and would potentially present much stronger resistance to conquest.

But yes, without Columbus (or someone like him, around that same time period), no disease, and the world winds up looking VERY different.
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