Life in the Americas Before Columbus (2002)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
"The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. [. . .] When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted."
The native Americans didn't have the same natural resistances to the diseases the Europeans brought. At some points, Smallpox traveled so quickly through the native populations that whole villages would die before the Europeans even got there.
Today, only in the US and Canada, i.e. Anglo-Saxon colonies, the Native populations are dismally low. Just across the border in Mexico you already start seeing largely Native and mixed Native-European populations thriving, instead of being wiped out. The same story continues throughout Central and Latin Americas.
Granted, agricultural societies existed in North America too, but aside from the pueblos in New Mexico and some urbanized communities associated with the Mississippi Valley Civilization and its offshoots, the population density and urbanization didn't compare to Mesoamerica and the Andes. This has a lot to do with why present-day Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, etc. have large indigenous communities relative to Canada and the US: there were higher populations there to begin with. It doesn't necessarily mean that the proportion lost to disease and warfare was any less.
To bring this back to the parent comment: The anthropology museum [1] in D.F is incredible both in depth and scale. It covers the history of the city and area so thoroughly. I had no idea about the extent to which civilization had persisted in Mesoamerica before I spent half a day wandering around this museum. It's such a fascinating history and it's available to see right there through the recovered artifacts and the current ruin sites both in D.F and just outside (such as Teotihuacan [2]).
Oh, and if you go stay here: http://theredtreehouse.com
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Nacional_de_Antropolog%C3... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
Cortés arrived in Mexico with a few hundred men and allied with locals to overturn the Aztec empire, but natives were always the majority of his alliance. And natives have always been the majority of the ancestors of Mexicans, even today. The pre-Hispanic civilization persists in every aspect of life from street grids to artistic styles. There are still more Mexicans living on canals than Venetians.
I was bicycling through the mountains of Milpa Alta one day; Milpa Alta is inside the Federal District of central Mexico City but more rural by virtue of steep mountainsides rising straight up from dense valley development. I came to the town of Milpa Santa Anna where I rode to the charming central square. Narrow old streets are colorful and lively there with some cross streets passing each other on bridges due to the steep hillsides. There was a public notice board in the central plaza where all notices were posted -- ten miles from the denser parts of Mexico City -- in Nahuatl -- the original Aztec tongue -- as well as Spanish. Except there was one notice posted only in Nahuatl. I can't tell you what that one said because I don't speak the language, but it really makes you feel like a foreign traveller in the deep past when public notices are still written in Aztec.
It's not just large relative to Canada and US, it's absolutely dominant. In Mexico, 88% of population is Native or mixed-Native. Compared to less than 2% in the US. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Ameri...
How do you explain Canada's endless "dual language" bickering? Is that Anglo speakers vs. Saxon speakers?
The United States was formed long after most of the plagues that devastated the native North Americans, yet it was the US government that bought the vast Louisiana Purchase territory. From whom? And bought Alaska? From whom? These places had quite a low density of native populations long before they became "Anglo-Saxon".
How could you not understand a point that you are restating? Today's US and Canada are obviously not just the "Anglo-Saxon colonies".
Unless I'm mistaken, you claim you are trying to make a point about North America, not the East Coast of North America, and you insist on referring to places such as the vast American Southwest, the Louisiana Territory, Quebec, and so on as, "Okay, read it as 'former Anglo-Saxon colonies'". You can't see anything wrong with your point?
Clearly, I have to try something else, so does your point about Anglo-Saxon colonies and native populations require us to characterize California and Quebec as "former Anglo-Saxon colonies" or not?
If it were me, I'd give up the fashionable notion that this is about nasty Anglo-Saxons and a phenomenon only seen in the US and Canada and take a closer look at North American former colonies like Massachusetts (English) and Quebec (French), and almost as large South American former colonies like Argentina (Spanish) and Brazil (Portuguese), where the native population is a tiny fraction of the overall population, and compare them to those countries in the middle that still have a majority native population, and ask yourself what the first group have in common with each other that differs from the latter group.
It isn't Anglo-Saxon-ness.
The populations of Indians in the US/Canada were smaller so the French/English pushed the natives out, while maintaining a buffer of undesirable poor Europeans on the frontier.
And they were all clean and free of any diseases? Only the Europeans had these "devastating" diseases?
"The native Americans didn't have the same natural resistances to the diseases the Europeans brought."
How did the European diseases kill off the Native Americans but not the other way around?
It boils down to a few basic ideas
1: Native american's had no real concept of quarantine. If someone was sick, the extended family would take care of them. In turn the extend family would become infected, and infect the rest of the village/tribe as they travelled.
2: Europeans lived in cities with much greater population densities. Their immune systems were much more accustomed to dealing with a large variety of infectious agents. Whereas the native americans live is small homogenous villages. With very little exposure to outside influences, other than other tribes/villages.
Here's the wikipedia page, which actually goes into more depth:
A personal pet peeve of mine is that Alfred Crosby wrote about this stuff in the 1970s (The Columbian Exchange) and the 1980s (Ecological Imperialism) but Diamond gets all the credit for it because he successfully repackaged it for more popular audiences, without adding much.
1. I read somewhere that the probable migration of native Americans over the ice-age land bridge between Asia and Alaska meant that the peoples lived for generations in climates too cold for new pathogens to evolve to infect humans. I guess because there weren't enough animals in the area with a sufficient genetic similarity to humans. So by the time people migrated south to warmer climates, they had no natural immunity to the diseases common in Europe.
Another way to look at this is that Europe is closer to Africa. Africa is where most human diseases come from, because it's where humans evolved, and the diseases got to co-evolve with them.
2. Native Americans had better hygiene. And by that I mean they bathed regularly. Europeans were, by most accounts, sort of disgusting. They lived mostly in a cold climate (remember it was colder back then), and saw nakedness as unacceptable pretty much ever. They mostly just didn't bathe. Perhaps this is why the earlier failed Viking settlements had less of an effect on the native American population.
And they washed their faces, teeth, and hands at least daily.
EDIT- It occurred to me that early New England colonists might have been different from the general European population, being more strict in their living style based on religious beliefs. That might explain it, but I've never looked into Puritan bathing habits.