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Comment by patrickfl | Hacker News Reader

When I first saw this post I thought (Amazon.com) came out with a new product called "rainforest."

Anyway, so did the natives breed with the Europeans when they "wiped them out" or did the native people migrate to another part of the continent?

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Basically malaria was unknown in the Americas before western explorers brought it over. From there it became very prevalent in some places such as the Amazon and essentially made mass agriculture impossible there. Then pretty much everyone starved. There were also things like smallpox that devastated people everywhere in the Americas but those were more a one time thing, people were able to rebuild after they passed.

Good video on that, which a lot of people might have seen but still worth linking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

Isn't a devastating, long-term drought a recent and popular theory as well, decimating many Central and South American tribes such as the Mayans and the Aztec?

[1]http://science.time.com/2012/11/09/mayans/

I believe the drought predated contact by ~7-800 years. Definitely explains the decline of the Mayans, but not really relevant to discussing the effects of Columbian contact.

The Aztec were destroyed by the spanish, particularly Hernán Cortés.

Neither. They died.

That's not correct. There are tens of millions of Native American ancestors living across Latin America today. Latin America has roughly 600 million people, they are not all European and African.

True, but this is in the Amazon in the first 150 years after the Spanish. 90-98% died, mostly of disease. There are more native people now then in 1650.

You're not alone.

I was thinking about an initiative to publish books on recycled paper or something, then I finished reading the sentence.

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