[delta_p_delta_x]

> Unfortunately, the Native Americans did not invent it quickly enough

This is false. Most native Americans throughout both continents—especially those in Mesoamerica—were powerful civilisations in their own right with plenty of agricultural history.

What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

[jandrewrogers]

There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people. This is well-documented. The exact nature of this hemorrhagic fever is a major open question in the history of North America, and the natives attested its existence before the Europeans arrived AFAIK.

We know about hantavirus in the southwestern US and Mexico but that seems unlikely to be the source based on its epidemiology. This is one of the most interesting scientific questions about North America, the possibility of a latent hemorrhagic virus that has heretofore not been isolated due to a few hundred years of dormancy.

Smallpox definitely added to the problem, especially in more northern parts of the Americas, but there is substantial evidence of brutal culling by a disease we can’t explain in the southern parts of North America.

[Retric]

1545 is well after European contact and close enough that it seems unlikely to be a coincidence. 1519–1521: Hernán Cortés conquers the Aztec Empire. 1532–1533: Francisco Pizarro conquers the Inca Empire.

Further low 10’s of millions of deaths on its own really doesn’t explain the 90% population drop across several hundred years here. Smallpox killed between 65% to 95% of Native American populations but it was far from alone. We’re talking devastating plague after plague for generations which canceled out the tendency for populations to rebound when competition is low. Something like 200+ million deaths on the conservative side over a few hundred years not just one or two devastating but short lived outbreaks.

[jandrewrogers]

It is interesting precisely because we know it wasn’t smallpox and we know it killed a large portion of the native population in places like Mexico. 1545 was just the first year the disease was documented by Europeans. There have been a dozen epidemics of this into the 19th century and then it just disappeared, long before smallpox was eradicated. It also didn’t spread indiscriminately across North America, it was correlated with specific types of environments.

The particular epidemics in question killed both natives and Europeans. Furthermore, the manifestation of the disease was unfamiliar to the Europeans.

You are assuming facts not in evidence. This is actually pretty interesting because it suggests there is a latent pathogen with a very high fatality rate in the Americas. It wouldn’t be the first.

We saw this with the hantavirus. The Old World hantavirus species were never dangerous enough to even deserve a footnote, but the New World hantavirus species are essentially like Ebola. But outbreaks are very rare and hantavirus doesn’t seem to be communicable between humans, so the damage is localized. The hemorrhagic fever that killed millions of people in the desert-y parts of the Americas a few centuries ago was something else.

[eru]

Well, we have plenty of plagues to go around in Eurasia. There's plenty of diseases we barely notice, because pretty much everyone has enough immunity to mostly shrug it off.

[mock-possum]

> There was a hemorrhagic fever in ~1545 an ~1576 that killed tens of millions of people

I haven’t heard of this - do you have any material to recommend on the subject?

[mkl]

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

[surgical_fire]

> disease we can’t explain

Disease we can't explain that spread a few decades after European ships full of plagues arrived.

I mean, yeah, sure.

[TheOtherHobbes]

You're making a fair point. Any native pathogens would have been shipped back to Europe with slave populations.

The fact that Europe didn't have the same catastrophic population decline suggests that either that didn't happen (possible, but a stretch) or that Europeans already had immunity.

Which would only be true if there was some freak genetic immunity (also a stretch) or the disease was already in wide circulation (far more likely).

[hax0ron3]

That played a large role, but they were also pretty far behind Europe in military technology so I am almost certain they would have been conquered anyway. It would have just taken longer.

I'm no expert in the matter, but from what I've read it seems to me that the Mesoamerican civilizations in 1492 were probably at about the military level that the Eurasian civilizations had already reached in the first millenium BC.

[surgical_fire]

Around 90% of the people died of plagues.

It's really impossible to speculate how things would have progressed without those plagues.

Or worse, if Native Americans were full of plagues that the conquistadors would bring back to Europe to cull 90% of Eurasia.

[hax0ron3]

I agree that if the disease luck had gone the other way and a large fraction of Europe had died of disease then it's possible the Native Americans would have remained unconquered. If the disease factor was just taken out of the equation completely, I think the Native Americans would have been conquered, simply because of the great European advantage in technology. But the conquest would have looked more like England's colonization of India, and many more of the native cultures would probably have had a chance to evolve and assimilate modern technology, like India's cultures did, rather than just going extinct.

[OkayPhysicist]

There's some speculation that Syphilis may have been a new world plague. The first major outbreak was a couple of years after Columbus returned, but figuring out when the first ever case was has proven more difficult.

[actionfromafar]

It’s impossible to tell. If it had taken decades or a century longer because their numbers were higher, they might have had time to start up their own production of technology.

[Glyptodon]

I think the thing to consider isn't really if the conquering of the Americas to some degree wouldn't have happened, but if a larger population would have changed or slowed the interactions between Europe and the Americas in various ways.

[riffraff]

In things like the battle of Cajamarca the Incan lost a battle against the Spanish with 8000 warriors against 150. All the 150 survived.

Disease was important but there was a large technological and cultural gap too (e.g. the Incan didn't fight at night!).

[vasco]

Around the same time, 460 men in 6 ships destroyed 30000 men in 400 ships taking over Ormuz. Portugal and Spain were just incredibly OP during that time period. And the people in Ormuz were more advanced than the natives in US. And they still got absolutely destroyed.

[tehnub]

I just read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca

It seems like the Incans were overconfident and didn't expect a surprise attack (didn't have their weapons, only a small retinue around the rule in ceremonial garb instead of armor), and then the 8000 warriors were outside and didn't even attempt to fight the Spaniards because they were so demoralized.

[riffraff]

Well, yeah, and if you keep reading about it, the whole rest of the campaign has the same tenure.

Spain conquered and held the whole Incan empire with 168 men, also fomenting smaller factions and internal feuds etc.

The scale of this is absolutely insane.

[avadodin]

> the Incan didn't fight at night!

To be fair to the Inca, I didn't expect the night–vision–equipped Spanish Inquisition, either.

[circlefavshape]

You're missing a zero. It was EIGHTY thousand, not 8000.

[riffraff]

I thought so too, but wikipedia says 8k

[circlefavshape]

Ah weird - the text of the page says Atahualpa had 80k troops, but then the infobox describes the Inca forces as 3-8k in size. I guess not all the 80k were involved in the battle

[AJMaxwell]

The lack of animals to domesticate meant fewer zoonotic diseases in Native American populations, so they were ill equipped when those diseases appeared.

IIRC, there was a massive plague in North America a decade or so before Columbus arrived.

[Auracle]

I never understand the “lack of animals to domesticate” angle. They did domesticate animals, such as the llama and alpaca.

More could have been domesticated and presumably would have been if the had more time to advance. It’s a shame giant sloths were killed off…

[t-3]

Cattle, oxen, horses, camels, mules, donkeys, etc. The animals that are capable of heavy labor at or exceeding human level weren't present in the Americas. Llama and alpaca are more useful for fiber and meat than labor. Buffalo might possibly be useful but they are too big, wide-ranging, and aggressive to be easily tamed and bred.

[eru]

Remember chicken and pigs, too. Not useful for labour, but good sources of high value nutrition, and can be fed of scraps or whatever they find around the house and garden.

In Europe, pigs like eating acorns, which are otherwise fairly useless to humans.

[pfdietz]

In North America, deer eat acorns, but apparently are not suitable for domestication.

[t-3]

Farming the white-tailed deer native to the Americas has become somewhat common in the old world and reindeer have also been domesticated as beasts of burden across northern Eurasia. AAIU, the body structure of white-tailed deer isn't very suitable for labor, they can jump very high, and are not particularly gregarious or easy to keep in herds. The North American caribou (reindeer) population only inhabits the far north and is seasonally nomadic, migrating over very long distances. Other, larger, native species like moose are usually considered too big and too aggressive to tame.

[eru]

I think plenty of animals eat acorns. It's just that humans can't really do much with them.

I think you can eat a few in an emergency, but there's some chemicals in there that ain't so good for humans in larger quantities.

[underlipton]

The Americas is a large area comprising multiple biomes and the cultures endemic to them, but the general rule is that domestication wasn't a matter of advancement, because it did take place, but took a very different form from in much of Eurasia. Rather than directly subjugating animals, American cultures (and African, and certain nomadic cultures of the Eurasian interior) adapted other parameters they could control to the natural rhythms of "wild" animal populations.

E.g., https://www.usgs.gov/programs/climate-adaptation-science-cen...

[alsetmusic]

So a lack of animal husbandry is the same as lower technology and a lack of farming.

[peyton]

There’s some more recent scholarship than Guns, Germs, and Steel. See Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 [1]. The truth is maybe a bit more complicated. We had doctors volunteering to visit tribes who recorded what they observed firsthand.

Personally, given the evidence at hand, I think it’s likely the populations on this continent were caught in large boom/bust cycles, and we happened upon them right at a bust cycle. It’s definitely up for debate. There’s also modern work on smallpox using genetic clocks etc to consider.

[1]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674013056

[alsetmusic]

> we happened upon them

That's the thinking. It's not that people arrived. It's not that ancestors landed. It's that European's happened. This was unavoidable. The rest of the world was deficient for not being ready.

[zirgs]

Yeah, someone would have started to cross the oceans eventually. Europeans happened to do that first.

[alsetmusic]

Stupid people may not be able to read sarcasm. I figured HN would have enough internet literacy, but maybe not.

[eru]

Well, if you give a charitable interpretation to the grandfather comment, they didn't say that they didn't invent agriculture in North America. Just that they were a bit slower to get started.

[ywvcbk]

They didn't invent it quickly enough i.e. they generally lagged behind Eurasian civilizations by several thousand years so by 1500 they were approximately still stuck in the bronze age or so.

[t-3]

American agriculture was very advanced for the time and the crops and ideas developed transformed food and agriculture throughout the rest of the world. What was lacking were beasts of burden and metallurgy and resistance to smallpox.

[actionfromafar]

Isn’t there indications that even large parts of the Amazon is in actuality planted?

[mr_toad]

> What finished many of them off was a lack of resistance to smallpox, which was brought over by the first explorers/colonists.

They lacked herds of domesticated animals, which not only held them back agriculturally, but were also the source of diseases like smallpox.