[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

I also first caught this story in Discover. In fact, I was going to post the story from their website but my search turned this up.

I find this story very interesting because we've always been taught that the 'New World' was an Eden full of happy harmonious people that the white man destroyed when he brought over horrible diseases and greed for natural resources. We're all supposed to have a national culture of guilt and shame over this.

The scientific community probably won't give these researchers the time of day. If they did research to "prove" that the white man was even more horrible and destructive than previously thought, they'd give them Nobel prizes.

[muawiyah]

If you lined up all the Indians in ranks as wide as all the Spaniards in the Americas in the early 1500s, and you gave the Spaniards guns and swords, and the Indians pretended they were harmless and were unarmed, and you marched them toward the Spanish, the Spanish could not have killed even a small percentage of them in this manner.

Hanta virus, however, can kill millions of people in short order and leave civilizations destroyed in its wake.