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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

> A lack of resistance and no sanitation

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.

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This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris.

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.

Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks.

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 didn;t say that it didn't - in fact, the reality was mass casulty events where common in a way that is unthinkable. We do _ in fact_ have plenty of mass graves for colonists. The lack of evidence of the same on the American Indian side makes me skeptical of the whole narrative.

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.

You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with this word colonist. The mass graves are either “imported criminal” (being in debt was a crime) or slave populations.

And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.

One story I've heard is that European colonists in the Caribbean only survived a few years before dying of Malaria. The natives didn't do any better.

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.

> Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation.

I don't know what this means. Moving to another location is practical, but not sophisticated.

Well if your only definition of sanitation is urban ones, then they had that as well as I pointed out. I think the fact that they had sanitation practices in both urban and rural areas is quite remarkable. Clearly you don't and felt the need to share that opinion. Thanks.

What were these remarkable sophisticated sanitation practices in North America?

Please reread the comment you just responded to. I said it was remarkable (as in, worthy to be remarked) that these practices happened both in urban and non-urban cultures.

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

The Aztecs were in Central America, not North America. Recall the quote from Britannica (your cite):

"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.

Mexico is North America.

And also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript

From the britannica:

"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.

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