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Comment by yowzadave | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why there weren't diseases endemic to the new world that would affect Europeans in the same way that smallpox did to the indigenous populations. Were diseases better able to spread in Europe due to city size/density/public health differences?

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Syphilis appeared in Europe in 1493, and it's widely believed the Columbus crew brought it back from America, though last I heard it's not considered 100% proven.

The Old World had bigger cities and more domesticated animals, which promotes epidemics.

I also assume the fact the our species is indigenous to Africa means that's where our natural predators have had vastly longer time to evolve.

Many of the deadliest human diseases including those that ravaged the new world like smallpox, influenza, and measles were zoonotic diseases that originated in domesticated animals. Since the new world didn't have as many domesticated animals, they had fewer zoonotic diseases.

It's also largely an accident of history. The Conquistadors inadvertently introduced smallpox suddenly by sending for reinforcements during a Caribbean smallpox outbreak. The Mayans that the Spaniards spent the next two centuries conquering weren't nearly as quickly exposed and died off in fewer numbers from European diseases.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel", by Jared Diamond, is basically a book-length answer to this question that I would highly recommend.

There are better resources than GGS, actual historians and anthropologists are quite critical of it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pmu2ft/recom...

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

That's what you get when you have a scientist try writing a book that's simultaneously popular science and popular history. And judged as a popular history GGS does get a lot of things wrong and isn't up to the standards historians work to hold up. But on more scientific questions like "why there weren't diseases endemic to the new world that would affect Europeans in the same way that smallpox did to the indigenous populations" it does a good job.

EDIT: Really, the reception to GGS is probably one of the best illustrations of what Thomas Kuhn was talking about in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about different paradigms having different rules that I can recall seeing in my lifetime.

Mainly "actual historians and anthropologists" on reddit and in related circles. GGS is far less controversial outside these circles and often lauded - also by "actual historians and anthropologists".

I have significant doubts about that.

Plagues Upon the Earth is maybe even more on point to the plague bit in particular, with the co-evolution of human society and infectious disease over history taking the front stage.

My understanding is that the leading hypothesis is that:

1. The “Old World” had a much more extensive animal husbandry. A lot of the nastiest diseases human beings pick up come from animal reservoirs. With humans living in closer quarters to animals for a much longer period of time in Eurasia/Africa than the Americas, more diseases crossed over and became endemic among the population.

2. A great amount of the Eurasian continent is along an East-West axis, whereas the Americas are primarily North-South. This means that seasons and climates and climates tended to be more closely aligned, which leads to easier spread of agriculture and domesticated animals, which leads to faster population growth and disease spread.

Eurasia is massive compared to the Americas and has a lot more domesticated animals, so there were more diseases percolating there.

Europe got syphilis from the old world

Not just syphilis. Tropical diseases like yellow fever and malaria decimated european settlers for centuries. That's a large part of why Haiti could break free from France for instance, France would send troops, half of which were dead within months from diseases.

That's also what protected inland parts of Africa from colonisation until the XIX century.

Yellow fever and malaria were brought to the New World by Europeans.

It was also a major reason for bringing in Africans slaves to work the fields, as they survived much longer that Europeans.

The diseases that you mention are of African origin and, when introduced into the New World, massacred the natives almost as efficiently as smallpox.

Africa is a huge cauldron of human pathogens, which is not that surprising, given that hominids developed there. As a rather tragic consequence, Africans were sought after as slaves, because they were resistent to many of the diseases that killed white or Amerindian indentured workers.

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