Introduced Diseases - This is how microbes can destroy entire peoples

Mass extinction by introduced diseases on the example of America

"The greatest human disaster in history, far greater than the disaster of the Black Death in medieval Europe." Historian David Cook on the European epidemics in America.

In 1492, Columbus and his crew entered the Caribbean. Less than a hundred years later, 90 percent of Native Americans had been wiped out. Genocide, rape, enslavement, expulsion and wars by the Spaniards had contributed significantly to this hitherto greatest mass destruction of human life in history. But the invaders would never have been able to subjugate an entire continent so unhindered if they had been assisted by non-invisible helpers: the viruses and bacteria brought in by the Europeans seized most of the Native Americans and hurried ahead of the Spaniards. Flu, measles or smallpox eradicated whole civilizations, many years before the conquerors reached them - on the Amazon as well as in Honduras.

contents

• Mass extinction by introduced diseases on the example of America
• The death of the Tainos
• Killer germs in Mesoamerica
• Historical mass extinction
• Plague herds and damned cities
• Invisible evil spirits
• Lack of immunity
• Helpless medicine
• The cause was closed to the locals
• The smallpox conquer the Inca empire
• The main victims were the high cultures
• Which diseases raged the worst?
• Defenseless against the measles
• Cattle and viruses
• Collapse of civilization
• Vaccinate against the horror
• Traditional eyewitness accounts

The death of the Tainos

When Columbus discovered Hispaniola in 1492 (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), an estimated 500,000 Tainos lived there. The entire coast was full of villages and smaller towns. On Columbus's second trip in 1493, a large part of his team fell ill. In just a few years, half of his 500 men died in Hispaniola. The illnesses were probably typhus, whooping cough and flu.

When Columbus entered America in 1492, he unknowingly initiated one of the greatest mass extinctions in human history. (Image: ArTo / fotolia.com)

Among the indigenous population, the introduced epidemics continued to rage: In 1508, the population of Tainos was estimated at only 60,000 people. Ten years later, only 18,000 natives were left. Then the measles were brought in and raided these survivors to about 1,000 survivors there. Finally, in 1542, not a single Taino was over.

Killer germs in Mesoamerica

In 1519, the Hidalgo Hernando Cortés came to Mexico with a few hundred Spaniards in a highly developed empire with the center Tenochtitlan, one of the largest cities in the world at that time with more than 300,000 inhabitants.

The colonial hero story tells how a tiny bunch of Spanish soldiers brought this great power in Central America to its knees. On the one hand, it is concealed that the Spaniards were joined by tens of thousands of indigenous warriors, who were eager to free themselves from the Aztec yoke. On the other hand, introduced plagues before the conquerors and gathered many locals there.
One year after the arrival of the Spaniards, smallpox raged in Mexico for the first time. In just two months, about half of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan died. In less than two years, the disease killed up to eight million people - the infrastructure collapsed.

In the Noche Triste (Spanish for Sad Night) in 1519, the Aztecs had risen against the Spaniards and killed many of the invaders. The survivors fled to Tlaxcala, 50 kilometers from Tenochtitlan. Presumably, Cortés men would no longer have had a chance to stand against many thousands of trained Aztec warriors. But just then, the smallpox in the valley of Mexico broke out. The Spaniards saw the plague as a sign of God for their victory. The smallpox killed not only every second inhabitant of the city, but also the Aztec emperor Cuitláhuac, who had built a swift war alliance.

The epidemic broke the morale of indigenous warriors. They saw that the disease destroyed the Aztecs, but the Spaniards spared and saw in it a curse of their gods who had abandoned them. As the Spaniards marched into the city, a chronicler noted, "The streets were so filled with dead and sick that our men walked over nothing but bodies."
The smallpox also spread to Guatemala, the kingdom of the Maya. Although the great Mayan cities were deserted, the Maya still had the reputation of being relentless warriors. But the smallpox destroyed them as well as the Aztecs, so that ten years later, an officer of Cortés took the Maya areas in an instant. According to tradition, half of the Indians in Honduras died from an epidemic in the years 1530 to 1532.

In 1519, the capital of the Aztecs Tenochtitlan was considered the largest city in the world. (Image: f9photos / fotolia.com)

In 1532, Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado wrote to the King of Spain: "Throughout New Spain (Mexico), there is a disease that says that the measles that kill the Indians and flood the land are completely empty In addition to smallpox and measles, typhoid fever, bubonic plague and diarrheal diseases probably also raged in Central America.

In present-day Honduras, 600,000 people were believed to live when Columbus arrived. In 1550 there were only 32,000 indigenous people. That corresponds to a loss of around 95 percent. It is estimated that 400,000 people died of disease.

Historical mass extinction

Although estimates by historians vary, it is estimated that Columbus's arrival in the year 1492 saw approximately 4.4 million people living in North America, around 21 million in and around Mexico, six million in the Caribbean, and another six million in Central America , By 1543, indigenous peoples on the main Caribbean islands, such as Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico, had lost none of their lives - six million dead in fifty years. On smaller islands, spared by the epidemics, a few survived in a precarious existence.

In 1531, measles reached the continent and claimed countless lives. In North America, the microbes were already setting up their work of destruction before the European conquerors entered the country. They found only a sparsely populated continent.

Between the years 1539 and 1541 explored Hernando de Soto the southeast of the later United States. He described an Indian civilization called Coosa on the territory of today's states of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee with about 50,000 people. Twenty years later, Europeans only found deserted houses and overgrown gardens. In the Mississippi Valley de Soto found 49 cities, a century later, the French explorer La Salle reported only seven neglected settlements.

The introduced viruses and bacteria already reached many cultures before they even saw one of the invaders. (Image: pettys / fotolia.com)

In New England, the Europeans had barely settled, as an epidemic destroyed up to three-quarters of the indigenous population. In 1690, smallpox and measles simultaneously raged on a vast area from the east coast to the Mississippi.

Plague herds and damned cities

The conquerors believed that the Amazon was only inhabited by a few hunters and gatherers. Ruined cities in the rainforest of Mesoamerica have until recently held Europeans as the legacy of ancient pre-Columbian cultures. New research shows, however, that they ended only after the arrival of the Spaniards.

The stories of natives in Mexico, Venezuela or Brazil are full of sunken cities laden with a curse on evil spirits, and they are afraid to enter the areas where these cities are supposed to be. Despised as a superstition by the colonial rulers, however, it is a traditional real story, not unlike the collective memory of the plague in this country.

Invisible evil spirits

The locals died like flies for inexplicable reasons, offering bizarre glimpses: their limbs twitched, bloody sputages spurted out of their orifices and there was no help. The last survivors did the medically the right thing: they left the sites of their highly developed cultures and fled far into the woods - away from the "evil spirits" - away from the viruses and bacteria.

Lack of immunity

Unlike the Eurasians, the people of the double continent had not developed immunity to the invading pathogens because they had been isolated from Eurasia for at least 13,000 years. Most of our viruses and bacteria originally caused disease in animals and adapted to humans as they domesticated the animals. In the thousands of years of livestock husbandry, the immune system of cattle breeders adapted to the pathogens.

With the Spaniards came horses and dogs, later cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and chickens. The Brown Rat, a permanent stowaway on the ships, also entered American soil and with it a whole microcosm of deadly microbes.

Livestock has a longer and more varied tradition in Europe than in America. The more intensive handling of the animals resulted in other germs and resistance in Europe. The natives of America, however, were mostly vulnerable to the pathogens. (Image: ermess / fotolia.com)

Helpless medicine

Not only did the natives have no immunity to Europe's epidemics, but they did not have any method to combat it. By no means was that indigenous medicine "primitive": Mayas and Mexica, Toltec or Incas, as well as the peoples of North America knew countless medicinal plants and herbal medicine whose active ingredients are now found in pharmaceuticals.

In the Mayan medicine alone, at least 900 plants have been used as medicinal herbs, including aloe, agave, papaya, chilli and passion flowers such as saffron. But the natives were helpless against the new epidemics, in the Andes as in the Amazon, on the Missouri as in Mexico.

Rituals to heal diseases even spread the viruses and bacteria even more: Epidemics that hit entire crowds were regarded as punishments by the gods for misconduct, and the natives tried to compensate for this with prayers and sacrifices.

The indigenous also practiced a shamanic involvement of the sufferers in the community. This was quite successful as a psychosomatic method. Social integration strengthens the body's defenses and releases hormones that relieve the course of disease. Traditional sweat baths, which the natives regarded as spiritual cleansing, provide for improved blood circulation. As meaningful as these methods are to activate the self-healing of the body, they were so fatal in the new pathogens that spread through smear and droplet infections. They had easy play through these collaborative actions. Isolating the sick from the healthy could have slowed the epidemics, but this was unknown in Indian medicine.

The cause was closed to the locals

Nor could the indigenous people often recognize the connection between the epidemics and the European conquerors. Epidemic waves reached tribes in the rainforest or in the swamps of Alabama months or years before those affected saw even a single Spaniard. In 1520, for example, smallpox was raging among the Tarasks in western Mexico, killing the high priest, nobles, and uncounted common people. Only a year later, the Spaniards met the culture. Carriers were ambassadors of the Aztecs, who wanted to forge an alliance with the Tarascans against the Spaniards.

In many areas, Native American medicine was well advanced. However, she was powerless against the introduced epidemics. (Image: PB / fotolia.com)

In 1520, smallpox died in Tenochtitlan. Many of the patients died of hunger, others only had pustules on a few body parts. Some lost their eyes, others stained their faces, others faltered. In this first smallpox wave, no Spaniards stayed in the city.

The smallpox conquer the Inca empire

The conquest of the vast Inca empire in the Andes by the swineherd Francisco Pizarro and a bunch of cutthroats is even more magical than Cortes invasion of Mexico. But Pizarro's robber killer did not come alone. In 1524, smallpox raged in the central Andes. Hundreds of thousands of people died in Ecuador, including the Crown Prince. This sparked a war for the heir to the throne, which weakened the empire and Pizarro made the conquest possible from 1533 onwards. Presumably, this first smallpox epidemic eradicated half of the people in the central Andes.

The main victims were the high cultures

The Spaniards found it particularly easy to conquer the high cultures of the Incas and Aztecs. Centuries later, they had not subdued hunters and gatherers in the Amazon basin, and a few thousand Comanches, scattered across an area the size of Central Europe, made it impossible for the Spaniards to penetrate beyond the south of Texas. Moreover, after they took over the horse from the Spaniards, they raided far into Central Mexico, plundered Spanish farms, stole horses such as cattle, even visited cities without the Spanish colonial power taking control of them.

A major reason for the fact that technically much less well-equipped natives, whose numbers included only tiny fractions of the high civilizations of Tenochtitlan or the Andes, the Spaniards more than offered only when the conquerors took the millions in Mexico and Peru in a coup d'état, are the epidemics.

Although the great cities and cultures were quickly destroyed, small groups of indigenous peoples who had been spared the epidemics provided relentless resistance. (Image: pict rider / fotolia.com)

The hunter-gatherers lived mobile in clans and small groups and had little contact with the Spaniards and their animals outside of their raids. If the member of a group became infected, the disease usually only extinguished this small group and could not spread further. Incidentally, this also applies to the plague bacteria, which has always dealt with rodents of the steppes of Central Asia, but never caused any apocalyptic devastation for the shepherds there.

In the metropolises of Mexico and the Andes, on the other hand, there was a domino effect: masses of people died directly from smallpox, measles, typhus or flu. The dead and sick were missing as workers in agriculture. This was followed by a famine on the plague.

Which diseases raged the worst?

The biggest killers of the Natives were the smallpox in the years 1519 to 1528. Presumably it killed 35 percent of the total population in Central and South America - a similar extent as in the great waves of the plague in Europe. In addition, infectious diseases such as influenza, measles, typhus, mumps, diphtheria and bumps such as pulmonary plague. 1576 to 1591, the smallpox again claimed victims and destroyed about 50 percent of already shrunken populations.

It took around 100 years for the European epidemics to become endemic in America. Only 10 percent of the native population had survived. The mortality rate was probably reduced by mixing: The mestizos had stronger defenses than the pure indigenous people.

Defenseless against the measles

Not only did the Indians have fewer defenses against measles, their genetic bottleneck also ensured that they spread unchecked. All American Natives are descended from very few immigrants from Asia who settled on the continent some 11,000 to 14,000 years ago. If measles suffer from the same genes, their immune systems are very similar and the viruses can spread unhindered.

Cattle and viruses

One of the keys to why Europe's viruses and bacteria are wiping out the American natives, not the causative agents of America's Europeans, is livestock. The Indians domesticated only the dog, in North America the turkey, in South America the guinea pig and the Warzenente as well as the Lama and the Alpaka.

The Native Americans domesticated primarily only dogs, turkeys, llamas and guinea pigs. Her immune system was not focused on germs from pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys, horses and chickens. (Image: filipefrazao / fotolia.com)

In Europe, on the other hand, livestock farming was a central component of the society, from pigs, cattle, sheep and goats to donkeys and horses, to geese, ducks and chickens. For thousands of years, Europeans lived close to these animals and were permanently exposed to their germs.

Most epidemics that afflict humans are mutated pathogens that originally attacked animals. The smallpox, for example, originated from a mutant cowpox virus, rinderpest migrated to humans and became measles; Tuberculosis probably also comes from cows, malaria was common in chickens and ducks, whooping cough in pigs or dogs. All of these pathogens did not just adapt to humans; conversely, people in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa also adapted to the pathogens. The Americans, on the other hand, were completely helpless. For tens of thousands of years, they never had a chance to develop resistance to measles, chickenpox, mumps, smallpox, flu, cold, tuberculosis, yellow fever or typhoid because they had no contact with the pathogens.

When Europeans lived in ever larger cities, these old animal diseases broke out everywhere. The religious writings of the ancient world overflow with the descriptions of terrible epidemics, which were considered divine punishments. But no disease is 100 percent deadly. Over the millennia, those whose genes helped to survive the epidemics always survived, and they inherited them to their offspring.

In America, as far as we know, there were no animal-originating epidemics to that extent before Columbus arrived. They lived in cities as big as the Europeans, but not so long and so interconnected that common diseases spread to the same extent.

The brutal natural selection, which ultimately led to resistance to the pathogens, took thousands of years in Europe. In South and Central America, however, it focused on a few years from 1494 to about 1650. In North America fell in the 19th century cultures that had previously had little contact with the Europeans, the epidemic victims: So the smallpox eradicated within a few years, the Mandan who lived on the upper reaches of the Missouri.

Collapse of civilization

Douglas Preston, who discovered the presumably eradicated "White City" in the Honduras rainforest, explains the impact it had on Native American societies when 90 percent of their fellow human beings die from epidemics.

With smallpox and other infectious diseases raging for more than 150 years among American civilizations, around 90 percent of the population had been eradicated. (Image: Gudellaphoto / fotolia.com)

Preston shows what a mere statistic of 90 percent death rate means for the survivors. The plague claimed in Europe between 30 and 60 percent of the population in fatalities. This disaster saw contemporary witnesses as the downfall of the world. But the plague did not destroy civilization in Europe.

A death rate of 90 percent destroys civilizations, languages, historical developments, religions and cultures. It destroys the transmission of traditions and techniques from one generation to the next. The survivors, according to Preston, are cut off from the past of their culture, deprived of their stories, their music, their songs, they are torn from their identity.

Preston advises everyone to imagine what it would be like if only one in 19 people survived from our personal environment. One would see fathers, grandfathers, neighbors, friends and acquaintances die in a frightening way. One would see the fields go bankrupt, the cities rotting, as unburied dead lie on the streets and are eaten by dogs. Anything valuable would lose its value.

In our environment are the most diverse professions, such as a doctor, a priest, a scientist, an official, a teacher, an accountant, a merchant, a librarian, a carpenter, a farmer, a Färtleserin, a hunter, a cook, a seamstress, a shoemaker, a historian, a physicist, a biologist and an architect. After such an epidemic, for example, only one cook would be over. Not only will the necessary number of persons be missing to rebuild the destroyed, but also the knowledge about it will be irretrievably lost.

As Preston reports, this destruction has spread from cities to kingdoms and civilizations to entire continents. This inferno, according to the author, has destroyed thousands of civilizations from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, from New England to California, from the Amazon rainforest to the tundra of Hudson Bay. It was, according to Preston, the biggest catastrophe humanity has ever faced.

Vaccinate against the horror

Against smallpox, there is today an efficient vaccination program. The last known smallpox cases occurred in 1977 in Somalia. In 1980, the World Health Organization declared the world free of smallpox. Had the American Natives been vaccinated against smallpox, measles, the flu, and the other new diseases for them, millions of people would have survived - the history of the world would have looked different.

Europeans would never have been able to conquer the continent so easily and prevail against a large indigenous majority in all the countries of Central and South America. Incas, Mayans and Aztecs, Tainos, Tarasques and thousands of other peoples today would cultivate their traditions like the Hindus in India, the Buddhists in Thailand or the Shintos in Japan.

The unimaginable extent of annihilation was accompanied by an irretrievable loss of culture, knowledge, language and tradition. (Image: Elina Leonova / fotolia.com).

Traditional eyewitness accounts

A surviving Mayan report by Francisco Hernández Arana Xajilá describes the atrocities that currently prevail: "At first, they suffered from a cough and suffered from nosebleeds and cystitis. The death toll rose rapidly, it was terrible. Prince Vakaki Ahmak also died. Slowly, very slowly, heavy shadows and black night lay over our fathers and grandfathers and over us, my sons. Great was the stink of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers had died, half the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality rate was high. So we became orphans, my sons, when we were young. All of us. We were born to die. "
(Dr. Utz Anhalt, October 17, 2018)

swell

Douglas Preston: Lost City of the Monkey God - London 2017.
Free University of Berlin: The Great Suffering