Comment by acdha
1 day ago
I think they were just engaging in time-honored speculation about how different history could’ve been had a few historical accidents changed. For example, the Mayan civilization collapsed about 500 years before the Spanish showed up due to the worst drought in something like 7k years, so people have speculated about what Mesoamerica might have looked like when contact was made of those millions of people hadn’t died. Repeat for having draft animals, not losing the immune system lottery so badly, etc. Given their martial traditions it’s very plausible that in slightly different scenarios the arriving Conquistadors would’ve been killed or captured and lead to return expeditions.
The "immune system lottery" is really why the native Americans were doomed.
They could have caught up with the technology etc and stood their ground. But when 90% of the population dies at or before first contact, the remaining 10% doesn't have a chance.
Pretty sure this would have beaten the Mayas even if they were at the top of their game.
It's pretty wild how world history turned on such a random and completely unknown factor.
It's not really random. Disease development in the Old World was a combo of long term urbanisation and animal husbandry. Urbanisation in the New World existed but wasn't as old and obviously there was way less animal husbandry. Also assuming the Bering straight crossing hypothesis humans probably left almost every freaking old world parasite and disease behind by the time they got into the americas. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of eveolution of diseases that evolved in Africa/Eurasia pretty much gets purged during that migration.
Sure, "random" isn't the right term for what I mean.
There were reasons, but neither side understood them!
From their perspective, it just so happened that 80-90% of the population on one side died within weeks of contact. Often the disease travelled faster than the invaders, so as the went inland they found mostly empty settlements they could just take over.
It's easy to see how both sides could think that the god(s), in their inscrutable ways, had decided to give the land to the Europeans.
This also played out in the opposite direction in Africa. There the Europeans just couldn't survive for long until Malaria treatments became available in the mid 1800s, and so Africa was colonized last. Since Africa is where humanity originated, it has the most diseases and parasites that specialize in feeding on us.
Many of the diseases that afflicted the old world may have evolved after humans crossed into North America, so there was never any resistance in the New World.
Agreed, but this tradition of speculation had been around for decades before researchers figured out just how severe the plague toll had been. I think part of that was the lack of stone buildings in the eastern United States setting the tone for Americans to think that the native peoples outside of Mesoamerica had been small hunter-gatherer tribes because it took time to establish how large the pre-Colombian populations had been in places like the Mississippian culture or that there are ways to manage the environment other than by plowing fields for grains which weren’t native to the continent.
They also had a civilization knowledge base within them , which they could have mined. But there wasn't even a united south-north native empire.