[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).