[Hot Tabasco]

teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries

There's the evil white man again........

I'm more inclined to believe that most of the societies ultimately starved to death.......

If the Europeans are to blame for the diseases, why didn't they themselves die on the boats on the way over?

[DannyTN]

"The discovery adds to evidence that the hinterlands of the Amazon once teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries, Schaan said."

How on earth do they jump to the conclusion that it was disease brought by European colonists? There is no indication they know who built them, why, or even when? Much less why those structures were abandoned.

[DannyTN]

"The discovery adds to evidence that the hinterlands of the Amazon once teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries, Schaan said."

How on earth do they jump to the conclusion that it was disease brought by European colonists? There is no indication they know who built them, why, or even when? Much less why those structures were abandoned.

[wardaddy]

don’t forget...Amerindian culture was of course superior too....earth mounds and all being the haute culture of the time..

[Nepeta]

If the Europeans are to blame for the diseases, why didn't they themselves die on the boats on the way over?

By now, it's accepted that there were limited contacts between the "old" and "new" world well before Columbus, and even before the Norse, but in terms of diseases, people essentially lived in different universes before Europeans arrived and stayed.

I've read that many diseases jump from animal to human hosts. The old world domesticated far more species than the new [we received the cold virus from the horse] and upon contact of the two worlds, there were a lot more old world diseases to afflict new world peoples than the reverse. There is nothing sinister or conspiratorial about this--it simply is.

The Europeans sailing west carried diseases that had been in their populations for many, many generations, and they had resistance to them. New worlders had NO resistance to these diseases, and so they died by the millions.

[fish hawk]

Go to your dictionary and look up “immune”.