Posted on 05/06/2019 6:15:09 AM PDT by artichokegrower
In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, bringing to the New World a bounty of wonder: coffee, horses, turnips, grapes, wine.
But Columbus and his fellow explorers, in addition to importing crops and animals we now take for granted, were also the Typhoid Marys of their time.
The New World before Columbus: no typhoid, no flu, no smallpox, no measles.
The New World after Columbus: epidemics of death.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
They did.
Syphilis was the new king of diseases................
syphilis is one possibility. Although it was many years later, the men on the Lewis and Clark expedition had a very high percentage contract syphilis during the expedition.
And, the drumbeat for reparations to “First Peoples” begins...
Before Columbus there was no disease. People who died from unknown causes were probably just possessed by evil spirits. How far would the poor abused noble savages have come if not for the evil white man.
*puke*
Just the clap.
The Americas were lacking in large domesticable beasts.
According to Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel, 1997), since the europeans domesticated and lived with horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, geese, ducks, ox and cows they traded zoonotic diseases back and forth, and the survivors had genes to resist any number of diseases.
By the time settlers arrived in what would become America, something like 90% of the people here were already dead.
Dead of the diseases that to europeans were minor annoyances.
'If this is small pox, what must the great pox be like?' an Aztec is said to have wondered...
“We got the first step down.”
“Yup. Now all we need is our own Robert Jarvik.”
There is a great book that deals with that question called "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond
“Are we saying the Indians had no diseases at all???”
syphilis?
Good question. Hmmm...
The Noble Savage kills people retail.
The savage Noble kills people wholesale.
Does that sound about right?
re: “The Aztecs were pioneers in heart surgery.”
Getting it out was easy, the next step is the hard part ...
They would also have benefited from contacts with the ancient black Egyptians. That way they could have had an air force as well.
‘If this is small pox, what must the great pox be like?’ an Aztec is said to have wondered...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syphilis#Etymology
This...…..
*ouch*
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659/
The natives of the pre-Columbus era were a very sickly lot.
Today’s native indigenous enjoy average lifetimes approaching 80 years.
They are soooooooo victimized.
Columbus = Trump = Hitler or something.
The Natives gave the Spaniards and Italians syphilis in exchange.
It spread so rapidly in Europe that within 50 years, the King of England was infected.
Wouldn’t the great pox infest the big head, not the small one?
It would have been someone eventually, and unless it would have occurred in some inexplicably modern environment where all the new world populations were immunized to the old world’s diseases and microbiome, it would have been just as deadly.
It happened to have been Columbus, and we know a comparative lot about one of the most important hinge points in the history of humanity. If you think Columbus was a terrible person, you can still appreciate the magnitude of the columbian exchange.
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It kind of proves the point that you need very strong border security.
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