[ThanhPhero]

Early first contact but NOT first arrivals. As explorers pushed westward out of the original settlements they found the dead villages. The European diseases had already been there. Disease moved much faster than explorers. There had been visitors long before there were any settlers. Read 1491.

[TheThirdRuffian]

I don’t have to read 1491.

I’m married to a doctor who happens to be Mescalero Apache and specializes in communicable disease and who wrote her PhD thesis on what killed the Indians before the Apache, utilizing DNA samples of dead folk.

They were (at least in this area) full of hantavirus inside the skulls.