[Retric]

Even without germ theory Europe still used diseased blankets for attempted genocide on at least one documented instance in 1763. https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...

Excerpts: Amherst wrote on July 16, 1763, "P.S. You will Do well to try to Inocculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race. I should be very glad your Scheme for Hunting them Down by Dogs could take Effect,..." Bouquet replied on July 26, 1763, "I received yesterday your Excellency's letters of 16th with their Inclosures. The signal for Indian Messengers, and all your directions will be observed." Smallpox was highly contagious among the Native Americans, and — together with measles, influenza, chicken pox, and other Old World diseases — was a major cause of death since the arrival of Europeans and their animals.[27][28][29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare

What’s interesting about this is it wasn’t clear it actually worked. However, the approach suggests a better understanding of disease spread than a lack of germ theory would suggest. Plenty of evidence suggests biological warfare was common across European history. The last known incident of using plague corpses for biological warfare occurred in 1710, when Russian forces attacked the Swedes by flinging plague-infected corpses over the city walls of Reval (Tallinn).[18] However, during the 1785 siege of La Calle, Tunisian forces flung diseased clothing into the city.[17]

[upinsmoke1980]

Yes, Europeans had some general idea that disease was contagious, but that doesn't contradict anything I said. Smallpox blankets were used at least once and this was obviously terrible and should be condemened, as should the Aztecs' widespread practice of human sacrifice and the Iroquois's well-documented history of slavery and torture. Humans are great at being shitty to each other.

It's still true that far, far more native Americans were killed by European disease than through any deliberate act of European volition, and that's a fact that sits separately from any moral judgements we might make about anything.

[Retric]

That’s true on the surface, but there was a ~300 year gap between 1472 and 1763. By 1600 contact was widespread which should have been plenty of time to spread disease. https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-rec...

So, native populations should have had time to develop immunity to European diseases. At even 2.5% annual population growth rate a population recovers from a 90% population drop in under 100 years.

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/historical-rec...

Thus either disease was vastly more devastating than just 90%, genocide by Europeans was very intentional across generarions, or some other effect was in play.

[upinsmoke1980]

> At even 2.5% annual population growth rate a population recovers from a 90% population drop in under 100 years.

Then the population growth was obviously lower than 2.5%. That was partly due to European oppression of course, although the worst (U.S.) American crimes against the Indians didn't come until the 18th and 19th centuries (the Indian Removal Act/Trail of Tears being a particularly notorious example.)

No-one disputes that the overwhelming majority of the pre-Colombian population of the Americas was killed by infectious diseases in the decades immediately after contact. Jared Diamond is just one anthropologist who puts the figure at 90%. [0] It took the population of Europe 200 years [1] to recover its previous levels after the Black Death killed "only" 30 to 50% of its population.

If you read Diamond and Mann, there are some interesting explanations for why Native Americans were so susceptible to European diseases, much more so than in the other direction. Two big factors were that 1) Europeans had spent centuries living in much more densely-populated, interconnected, dirty and unhygienic towns and cities, so they'd already been exposed to more disease and thus had more immunity (although not total immunity as I'll discuss below). And 2) Native Americans were descended from a very small number of people - possibly just 4 or 5 waves of a few hundred people each - who originally crossed the Bering Strait from Asia, and this ancestral bottleneck meant they had far less genetic diversity than Africans/Euarasians, meaning that if a disease could kill one of them it could likely kill very many of them.

(Incidentally, syphilis is thought to be one of the few diseases that travelled the other direction in the Colombian exchange, i.e. it's thought to have originated in the Americas then spread to Eurasia.)

> So, native populations should have had time to develop immunity to European diseases.

It's not really that simple; diseases like smallpox were devastating all throughout history, even after thousands of years of "time to develop immunity". Many, many European settlers of the Americas were killed by smallpox epidemics; just go to [2] and ctrl+F "smallpox". What neutralised the threat of these diseases was vaccination, which didn't become widespread until the 20th century. We're so used to living in a post-vaccine world that we forget just how commonplace and devastating infectious disease used to be to all populations everwhere. (Although, of course, the events of the last year have helped to remind us.)

[0] https://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/variables/smallpox.html [1] https://www.ancient.eu/Black_Death/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

[Retric]

2.5% growth rate is slow when the population is young, space and food is abundant, and birth control is non existent.

European recovery was faster and much more complex than that after the Black Death. Europe’s population was 78.7 million in 1300, 70.7 million in 1350, and back to 78.1 million in 1400. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_demography A closer look into the numbers shows 80% recovery was quite fast even in areas that where devastated, but after that wars etc knocked the population back down.

It’s the classic S curve where growth is exponential up to carrying capacity and slows as you approach it.

As to immunity, I am referring to individual immunity from exposure and survival not genetic immunity. Europe never became immune to smallpox, but by exposing people young they are much more capable of fighting off infections. COVID deaths for people 35-44 are 10x that of people aged 5-14. We don’t think of 35-44 year olds as a high risk group because it just keeps getting dramatically worse as people age. 45-54 year olds are more than twice as likely to die as people 10 years younger. It more than doubles again 55-64, and by 65+ your in the high risk groups.