Why has Conservatism inexplicably become our generation’s Hollywood Squares?

George Turner in reply to George Turner says:

Yes, we do know what the Aztecs saw. The Spanish doctor (who had treated Spanish nobles, including I think the King) made detailed records of what happened, along with detailed autopsy records as good as any in Europe. What he saw looks like ebola. Even more interestingly, the Mexico City plagues kept recurring into the 18th century, and always followed the rains that broke a severe drought, implicating rodents as a vector. It might have been some devastating relative of hantavirus, but we’ll never know because it seems to have disappeared. It’s possible the plague cycle was broken by better sanitation and domestic cats imported from Europe. Oddly, one of the Mayan gods was named Trash Master, and Trash Master only attacked victims who left food waste lying around their house, leaving them bleeding from both ends (mouth and ass), which likely springs from the same disease.

What you’ve postulated is a contradiction in terms. Africa is not hit with multiple Virgin Soil Epidemics.

The CDC website on measles says they are, and lists the countries affected by the repeated virgin-soil epidemics. Apparently they don’t vaccinate. To a plague, every village that hasn’t been hit in the previous outbreak is virgin soil. In the case of a plauge with a 100% mortality rate among those who contract it, the virgin-soil aspect never goes away because none of the survivors of an outbreak were infected, leaving them all as virgin soil for the next outbreak.

What Henige is saying is that the idea that tens of millions, or hundreds of millions, of Indians were wiped out by plagues when nobody is looking is totally unsupported by evidence. It’s a narrative that didn’t even arise until the late 1960’s. He’s also saying that historical and archeological methods will not ever produce such evidence because they can’t.

If you applied similar methods to pre-Roman Europe you could make up endless narratives, such as suggesting that ice-age Britain had a population of about a hundred million, but that they were wiped out by devastating diseases carried by Indo-Europeans or Eskimo ice-travelers. Those diseases had a 99% mortality rate, as evidenced by the drop in Britain’s ice-age population, and we know Britain’s ice-age population was that high by estimating the number of survivors and dividing by the plagues’ survival rate.

That would be laughed at in European archeology circles, but is accepted practice in some New World academic circles.Report

George Turner in reply to George Turner says:

Smallpox isn’t deadly enough to wipe out a population, with a mortality rate of about 18%. Europeans have had major smallpox epidemics throughout history, including some devastating outbreaks that hit Greek city states. Is epidemiology and math somehow different the two sides of the ocean? Even where smallpox infects everyone, about 82% survive and carry immunity from then on. Indians were no different, and we know they weren’t different because we got to meet the countless survivors who carried smallpox scars, just like we did, and here their accounts nd tallies of the disease.

How many Europeans got smallpox? Pretty much all of them, all the time, for centuries. In fact, one medical historian calculated that smallpox killed 60 million Europeans from 1700 to 1800, and given its 18% death rate, not only did every single European catch it, but they all caught it twice! Regardless, instead of decimating their population, European numbers increased by 34%. There is no European immunity to smallpox. Their survival rates aren’t better than anyone else’s on the planet. So if smallpox can wipe out two continents worth of Indians, how come it couldn’t wipe out Europe?

Further, we know Indians had really high population growth rates or they couldn’t have sustained all the tribal warfare, much less the constant sacking of cities followed by ritual sacrifice of tens of thousands of captives – which had gone on for centuries. An 18% mortality rate, even if everyone got smallpox, just meant they needed to lay off the ritual sacrificing for six years and then resume it as normal. It’s a blip, like a drought and a famine.

The disease narrative is for children who can’t do math. Yes, the Indians had diseases, and we did too. Their existence doesn’t explain the disappearance of non-existant millions who weren’t seriously suggested to have existed until the 1960’s.Report

George Turner in reply to George Turner says:

Yes, and do you understand that even the virulent plagues wouldn’t have serious affected the long-term population numbers, just as they didn’t in Europe, or among the European settlers. On top of that, the worst outbreaks kept occuring in places like Boston, where the popoulation density is high enough to support fast-moving plagues (isolated villages with warring tribes are notoriously difficult targets for plagues that require human transmission). From an epidemiology perspective, it should’ve been the European settlers who got wiped out, not the Indians. Heck, we lived in cholera factories.

Once the populations intermixed, which they did very quickly, you can’t posit a chronic disease that somehow wipes out brown haired people but doesn’t affect blond haired people at all, yet has exactly the same fatality rates in blond and brown haired people, and we know the chronic diseases affect us the same because we still have doctors, diseases, and tens of millions of Indians among us.

As to a virulent plague, even if it infected 100% of the population of the Americas, every single person, and had a 99.2% fatality rate, a plague unprecedented in all of human history, the population should’ve fully recovered before the Mayflower even landed. And there’s no evidence of any such plague, so we might as well talk about a hundred million ice-age Britains wiped out by universal phone sanitizers.

The whole plague narrative is based on magical thinking, which is why it wasn’t advanced either by doctors or epidemiologists. It’s something you can imagine could’ve happened, but you can’t make the numbers work out, and even if you could, there’s no evidence that it happened.

What’s interesting is that in part people asserted that it must have happened because all the Indians got wiped out in places like Puerto Rico and such, where it was completely accepted that all the current inhabitants are Spanish, black, or Spanish and black, with only 0.5% or less being even of mixed Indian heritage. Then a meddling scientist sampled their DNA and lo and behold, well over 90% of them have Native American maternal DNA. As it turns out, at some point the rule was that if you speak Spanish, you’re not an Indian. “Nope, no Indians here! We’re all Spaniards!”Report