![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jan. 30th, 2009 11:21 amAha! I've been looking for this: a page torn from Archaeology magazine which explains why Native Americans were so susceptible to diseases brought to the New World from Europe, but not vice versa. Infections like measles, influenza, and smallpox killed millions of Native Americans. But why did they lack immunity?
The answer, sez the mag, is that their ancestors "left the Old World early and far from the scene where the first epidemic diseases were evolving between humans and their domestic animals, the initial source of many of these diseases." They travelled via the Arctic, where conditions acted as a "filter" against disease-carrying parasites, "and where migrating humans were spread so thinly on the landscape as effectively to quarantine any group that might be infected". In the New World, they were isolated from Old World diseases. And, without domestic animals, few new pathogens evolved that could have devastated Europe in the same way that epidemics swept through the New World. Few, but not none, of course: a skin infection, syphilis, would mutate into an STD and kill millions of Europeans.
(I'm fairly certain the article is Writing Unwritten History from the Nov/Dec 2000 issue.)
The answer, sez the mag, is that their ancestors "left the Old World early and far from the scene where the first epidemic diseases were evolving between humans and their domestic animals, the initial source of many of these diseases." They travelled via the Arctic, where conditions acted as a "filter" against disease-carrying parasites, "and where migrating humans were spread so thinly on the landscape as effectively to quarantine any group that might be infected". In the New World, they were isolated from Old World diseases. And, without domestic animals, few new pathogens evolved that could have devastated Europe in the same way that epidemics swept through the New World. Few, but not none, of course: a skin infection, syphilis, would mutate into an STD and kill millions of Europeans.
(I'm fairly certain the article is Writing Unwritten History from the Nov/Dec 2000 issue.)
