Pizzaro- well there’s a flash back to 4th grade! As horrible as public schools are now, from the stuff I read here, I got an excellent education in history. I guess maybe because so many teachers were hold overs from when prayers were still said, the Pledge of Allegiance was said every morning, and living in a conservative town. Music class taught us all the patriotic songs till we knew them by heart. I seem to have gotten in under the bell because my sister, 6 years younger, is a clueless, flaming lib.
Read em.
Not Pizarro, he was in Peru. De Soto.
What people don’t generally realize is that each of these plague diseases had a similar disastrous effect when they first emerged in Eurasia. Those still around a century or two later were of course by definition descended from the survivors, so had some natural immunity.
A few centuries later another plague would roll through. Everybody thinks of the Black Plague, but there were also great epidemics in the time of Justinian and of Pericles, and many others.
So the Europeans of the 16th century were descended from people who had for thousands of years been killed off intermittently by epidemics and gradually developed immunity to them.
But these same diseases Eurasians had been exposed to over millenia all moved into America in less than a century, hitting the natives almost simultaneously. No time to develop social immunity.