Basically malaria was unknown in the Americas before western explorers brought it over. From there it became very prevalent in some places such as the Amazon and essentially made mass agriculture impossible there. Then pretty much everyone starved. There were also things like smallpox that devastated people everywhere in the Americas but those were more a one time thing, people were able to rebuild after they passed.

Good video on that, which a lot of people might have seen but still worth linking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

Isn't a devastating, long-term drought a recent and popular theory as well, decimating many Central and South American tribes such as the Mayans and the Aztec?

[1]http://science.time.com/2012/11/09/mayans/

I believe the drought predated contact by ~7-800 years. Definitely explains the decline of the Mayans, but not really relevant to discussing the effects of Columbian contact.

The Aztec were destroyed by the spanish, particularly Hernán Cortés.

Neither. They died.

That's not correct. There are tens of millions of Native American ancestors living across Latin America today. Latin America has roughly 600 million people, they are not all European and African.

True, but this is in the Amazon in the first 150 years after the Spanish. 90-98% died, mostly of disease. There are more native people now then in 1650.

At least according to Jared Diamond, the primary killer (95% or so) of the natives was communicable disease.

The first smallpox epidemic alone killed about half of the Incas.

These weren't Europeans in the rain forest (which is a large continent of many different peoples), but mostly Spanish and Portuguese. Who married and had kids with native Americans. They weren't racist as we think of it today, they just held little regard for human life, especially little regard for non-christian human life.

To put this in perspective, this period came right after 100 years of bloody civil war in Spain that produced some of the most efficient killers the world had ever seen.

[EDIT] I shouldn't have said that they weren't Europeans, but that not all of Europe was represented, only Portugal and Spain. That blaming Poland or Germany for the activities of the Spanish was pretty unfair.

Since when are Spain and Portugal not part of Europe.

I didn't mean that they weren't Europeans, only that very little of Europe was involved and didn't deserve the parent's invective.

The Dutch controlled large parts of Brazil throughout the 1640s and 1650s, the French had substantial settlements in present-day Guiana and attempted to claim parts of Brazil as "France Antartique," and the English had a number of failed colonies in Amazonia and the Rio de la Plata as well. Heck, even the Scottish attempted to settle a colony in the Darien in present-day Panama. And that's not even including all the buccaneers and slave traders of various nationalities. I'm not interested in wading into the parent discussion, but just wanted to point out that colonialism in Central and South America really was a pan-European phenomenon.

Edit: also worth pointing out that the Spanish monarchs for the period we're talking about were the House of Hapsburg and hence claimed extensive territories in what's now Germany, Austria and Holland, so even many land-locked European regions were involved. There are a surprising number of Iberianized German names in colonial documents from Latin America.

Bizarrely, there was even a minuscule colonial empire ruled by a tiny vassal state of Polish-Lithuanian common wealth for awhile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Courland_and_Semigall...

Thanks, that is fascinating. I'll have to read more about this.

I suppose it would have been more accurate to say Iberians. They were Europeans, none the less.

One presumes that the non-whites also felt supreme, until the moment that they weren't.

You're not alone.

I was thinking about an initiative to publish books on recycled paper or something, then I finished reading the sentence.