It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.
And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today
Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.
The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed
Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.
Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/
https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi...
I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.
So the sugar industry started importing African slaves, who actually had some malaria immunity.
This worked pretty well, and the transatlantic slave trade went on for centuries.
I don't know what this means. Moving to another location is practical, but not sophisticated.
The North American cities were certainly more advanced in terms of sanitation than anything in Europe at the time. You had stuff like dual aquaducts differentiating drinking water from washing water and public cleaning crews and urban waste maangement and people bathed daily. While London was throwing its shit in the streets, the Aztecs were building public toilets
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
Clearly, North America was not including Central America.
And also:
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
Also, use of birch bark by the N.A. Indians wasn't until the 1800's.
the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act
there was also active ethnic cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare
https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-a...
"He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.”
https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-...
"Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government."
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigen...
There's a simple explanation for this. The colonists were literate, and would keep diaries and write letters about their experiences. Churches would log births, deaths, and marriages. Printers would print newspapers. Later, these materials were fodder for academics who converted them into historical narratives.
The Indians were not literate and so did not write letters and keep diaries.
Even things like the number of Indians cannot be pinned down with any precision.
there is so much easily searchable resources for this and though it might not be your intent, your comment reads as willfully ignorant for being so broad and bought into the type of 16th century Puritan Eurocentrism that many of the articles above discuss in depth
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems * https://www.science.org/content/article/roots-mesoamerican-w... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe_writing_systems * https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indigenous-languages-of-Nor...
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
And yes, I was referring to the North American Indians. I know the Mayans had writing. I even have a book on the Mayan writing system.
> they didn't have strictly hierarchical institutions that utilized this data for controlling their population
People did not write letters and keep diaries in order to control their population.
The book "Empire of the Summer Moon" which is a history of the Commanche empire, and the book laments that their only sources were diaries and letters written by colonists.
1: Sedentary farmers like Aztecs and possibly Pueblos and those doing Three Sisters farming, some of them like the Aztecs having significant civilizational achievements all considered.
2: Hunting nomads, first doing fire-stick farming to create good conditions for hunting animals as well as gather certain plants, and later utilizing horses after their introduction from Europe.
It doesn't mean they were stupid, they obviously picked it up quickly when they were exposed to it
We've deciphered Nahuatl and Maya script but Zapotec, Olmec, Isthmian, Quipu, and other scripts are still not well understood
"No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact"
In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt?), are you sure that amatl/amate counts as paper? It was possibly stretched bark, and not woven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amate#True_paper
> The Maya used a writing material called huun starting from the 5th century. It was made from the inner bark of the wild fig tree. It was cut and stretched thin rather than made of randomly woven fibers, which according to one source, disqualified it as true paper.
Aksum for a start.
It conquered part of the Arabian peninsula.
If it had partial natural borders like deserts, mountains and an active volcano, somewhat separating it from the rest of Africa in its south-western and western direction, and sizable numbers of Greeks and other peoples, and located on the very edge of Africa as close as possible to the Arabian Peninsula, it doesn't really seem to me to be the best example, upon closer examination. I can sort of understand why you would mention it as an example, though
Mali? Great Zimbabwe?
.
Great Zimbabwe's Great Enclosure is something, but it seems much less impressive than that of for instance Chichen Itza, despite being younger. And Great Zimbabwe must have had international trade, given artifacts from China was found there. On the other hand, archeologists and Europeans accidentally damaged it, and time wore it down, and thus it might have been more impressive than the current ruins indicate. The building approach with small, mortarless stones, and wooden lintel instead of arches or huge stones, despite the time period being 1100s to 1500s, might have limited what could be constructed, but perhaps the original edifices employed other techniques as well than wooden lintel. Though I do not understand how the wooden lintel survived that many centuries. Dry climate?
No one on either side had any real clue what was going on, and most probably thought it was a cruel punishment from the God(s).
Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone.
I understand the gist of this statement with regards to the size and complexity of indigenous civilizations, but we need to be much more careful with the framing.
Plenty of Native Americans (in both continents) survived the European diseases. but just looking at the North, the English colonists interacted heavily with Native Americans - hence the story of Thanksgiving. The "French and Indian War" pitted an alliance of the French and Indian nations against the English settlers.
It was a deliberate genocide campaign in the 19th century (a good 300 years after initial European contact) that largely exterminated native cultures from what is modern USA.
The current color of the continent is not some accident of "oh well we didn't know any better about disease". In Central and South America (and the far North), native cultures survived to a much greater extent and are still visible today.
In India the British deliberately caused famines, something they learned to do in Ireland. But the Irish famines are accepted and documented but British historians go out of their way to cover up their crimes against humanity in India and other colonies.
https://www.history.com/articles/colonists-native-americans-...