Indigenous Americans didn't carry over many of the serious diseases from the old world and the animals that were there mostly didn't contribute serious new ones. There are a few cases where we can see things like tuberculosis (from seals), but they're limited and evidence of them largely hasn't survived in extant populations. Likewise, Icelandic populations were isolated and relatively healthy. Those that survived the long trip to Greenland and the Americas would have been even more so.
Aren't syphilis and Lyme disease of New World origin?
As for Borreliosis, there are many variants of it endemic to Europe and spread by ticks. No evidence that it came from the Americas.
Neither of those spirochetes are zoonotic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Transmission
I had never heard the term until today, so take the claim with a pinch.
"Ötzi the iceman" had it 5kya: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-researchers-find-ancient-ic...
An ancestor to that bacteria was found in a tick that lived 15Mya: https://www.livescience.com/46007-lyme-disease-ancient-amber...
Missing a single erroroneous instance of a word that won't get caught by spell check may be embarrassing, but it's hardly material.
> ("Española Island…a part of the Galápagos Islands")
https://www.galapagos.org/about_galapagos/about-galapagos/th...
What is the error here?
note: Spain was unified in 1491.
Citation needed?
I always find the slightly emotional charge discussions (and subsequent downvotes) odd. There seems to be a very strong interest in certain groups to downplay or deride either the colonized, or colonizing side on measurements such as perceived development.
Obviously the land area of Spain has "always" existed. I think referring to "Spain's existence" as the socio-political entity established during the Reconquista is a reasonable position for a throw-away line during a HN discussion.
Not really. Old World societies had access to many more domesticated animals, a key reason that they also had major diseases.
The most charitable reading of this is "if cowpox, monkeypox or some other zoonotic pox virus had an opportunity to spread through Mesoamerican society, they might've fared better with smallpox."
A less charitable reading is "they might've faired better with smallpox if they had some other disease exposure prior to invasion."
Either of these cases seems implausible. I don't know of any pox virus from the Americas that provides immunity to smallpox. In Europe we know that cowpox provided immunity among milkmaids. We also know that it didn't spread between people. There's no reason to believe that the only missing element was time for some other pox to emerge. As for the less charitable reading, prior infection with a pathogen is unlikely to provide any benefit against an unrelated pathogen. In the decades after smallpox swept through Aztec society the Cocoliztli epidemics killed twice again as many people.
Fundamentally the problem was the introduction of a virus with a high mortality rate to an immunologically naive population. There's a major difference between a disease killing 50% of your under 12 population and 50% of everyone. The former is a disaster, the latter will collapse society, particularly one already fighting against an invasion.
Mesoamerica a few centuries later did end up having the density required for disease transfer as history shows, but it was also helped along by the Spanish's active invasion. If the Spanish hadn't ever set foot on shore and the Mesoamerican society was allowed to develop, they would likely have developed their own diseases and the subsequent immune response, which may have helped fight Smallpox. But the Spanish got there before they had that opportunity.
If the Spanish invasion had been replaced by a smaller troupe of Viking traders, I would be interested to see what would happen, and you might be right if you only change that one variable. But who knows?