[Nepeta]

If the Europeans are to blame for the diseases, why didn't they themselves die on the boats on the way over?

By now, it's accepted that there were limited contacts between the "old" and "new" world well before Columbus, and even before the Norse, but in terms of diseases, people essentially lived in different universes before Europeans arrived and stayed.

I've read that many diseases jump from animal to human hosts. The old world domesticated far more species than the new [we received the cold virus from the horse] and upon contact of the two worlds, there were a lot more old world diseases to afflict new world peoples than the reverse. There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about this--it simply is.

The Europeans sailing west carried diseases that had been in their populations for many, many generations, and they had resistance to them. New worlders had NO resistance to these diseases, and so they died by the millions.

[mamelukesabre]

I think they now claim that syphilis was given to europeans by native americans.

[wardaddy]

it's accepted that there were limited contacts between the "old" and "new" world well before Columbus, and even before the Norse

really..accepted by impartial scientists?

The Europeans sailing west carried diseases that had been in their populations for many, many generations, and they had resistance to them

If it's that simple to blame whites (as usual) then why didn't the Indians here have their own diseases to kill the whites in kind. Tropical areas are today the world's cesspools of contagions, so why not then? Granted that whites like everyone else had dealt with plagues and whatnot but why did Indians here not have their own diseases to which Whites were vulnerable like they do today....Ebola, AIDs etc today are endemic to tropical Africa.

What there is debate about is just how many millions of Indians there were. The truth is that due to their dispersal and lack of progress on relative civilization scales they simply could not support the populations Europe and elsewhere did. Their isolation hampered them same as it did Negroid tribes in Africa and Aborigines in Australia and elsewhere in the Pacific.

Nearly all such science today exists simply to find any fantasy route to blame whites and denigrate my ancestor's achievments...I fart in it's general direction.

PS...20 year vet of third world living...had the typhoid fever to prove it..Haiti

[wardaddy]

an epilogue to that rant:

there is an interesting theory that the number of infectious disease a culture has monkeys the same rate at which they were able to domesticate beasts...which could explain partially why there was less in the New world since they had little animal domestication