This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.
What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.
We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.
Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.
Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.
The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.
You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.
We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.
I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?
Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after European ships full of plagues arrived.
I mean, yeah, sure.
The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic population decline suggests that either that didn't happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans already had immunity.
Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in wide circulation (far more likely).
I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.
It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues.
Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.
Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).
It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.
Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc.
The scale of this is absolutely insane.
To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.
IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.
More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…
I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.
The American west coast is probably the most famous example of where they were widely used, with all three methods of processing in use according to local resource availability.
Long-term storage was achieved by drying and grinding into flour, oak groves were actively managed, and yields were enhanced by regular burning of undergrowth.
They were a nutritious, reliable, and low-risk source of calories with widespread availability, and the processing was time-consuming but not particularly difficult. Before the genocide, they'd have been the staple foodstuff for most people in an area stretching from the Cascades down to roughly where San Diego is today.
E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...
Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.
That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.
They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.
Everyone gets caught up in the wheel thing, but how many people have tried rolling a non-pneumatic tire loaded with weight up mountains or even just across broken terrain? We still got people carrying fridges and shit on their back up mountains in Nepal because wheels are still not useful on that terrain. Not to mention something we think of as old like the wagon wheel is the culmination of over 1000 years of innovation.
They did. Natives didn't have agriculture:
> It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.
The unfortunate thing is that those dumb Natives didn't learn to grow things. Something that had been observed for thousands of years.
Edit: We're talking ~10k years difference.
What they mostly lacked were antibodies against the numerous diseases brought by the Europeans. Measles, Mumps, Cholera, Tuberculosis, and so on.
If they had, perhaps Europe would have been conquered by South Americans instead of the other way around.
Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded.
Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.
It definitely did. Also note that agriculture was invented in multiple places over time. Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough, so they had far less time for technological development before Europeans arrived. At which point, it was too late.