Originally posted by FishHead111
Answer me.
If Europeans are such an evil virus then why do you live among them?

I am European.
And believe me, nobody knows hatred like Europeans do.

Originally posted by whodey
Why did the Europeans decimate the native American populations when they first arrived in the Americas and not vice versa?

Obviously the answer is because the Europeans had been exposed to more pathogens over the millennia than the early native Americans. So what does this say about the two cultures if anything? Did the Europeans live like vermin compared to their native American counterparts?

That was a very long time ago. Why do you insist on dwelling things we cannot change?

Originally posted by whodey
Why did the Europeans decimate the native American populations when they first arrived in the Americas and not vice versa?

Obviously the answer is because the Europeans had been exposed to more pathogens over the millennia than the early native Americans. So what does this say about the two cultures if anything? Did the Europeans live like vermin compared to their native American counterparts?

Mainly because of the latter's lack of domestic animals caused by the mass extinction of large mammals which accompanied Man's arrival in the New World:


The main reason becomes clear, however, if we ask a simple question: From what microbes could any crowd diseases of the Americas have evolved? We’ve seen that Eurasian crowd diseases evolved from diseases of domesticated herd animals. Significantly, there were many such animals in Eurasia. But there were only five animals that became domesticated in the Americas: the turkey in Mexico and parts of North America, the guinea pig and llama/alpaca (probably derived from the same original wild species) in the

Andes, the Muscovy duck in tropical South America, and the dog throughout the Americas.

That extreme paucity of New World domestic animals reflects the paucity of wild starting material. About 80 percent of the big wild mammals of the Americas became extinct at the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, at approximately the same time that the first well- attested wave of Indian hunters spread over the Americas. Among the species that disappeared were ones that would have yielded useful domesticates, such as American horses and camels. Debate still rages as to whether those extinctions were due to climate changes or to the impact of Indian hunters on prey that had never seen humans. Whatever the reason, the extinctions removed most of the basis for Native American animal domestication--and for crowd diseases.

The few domesticates that remained were not likely sources of such diseases. Muscovy ducks and turkeys don’t live in enormous flocks, and they’re not naturally endearing species (like young lambs) with which we have much physical contact. Guinea pigs may have contributed a trypanosome infection like Chagas’ disease or leishmaniasis to our catalog of woes, but that’s uncertain. Initially the most surprising absence is of any human disease derived from llamas (or alpacas), which are tempting to consider as the Andean equivalent of Eurasian livestock. However, llamas had three strikes against them as a source of human pathogens: their wild relatives don’t occur in big herds as do wild sheep, goats, and pigs; their total numbers were never remotely as large as the Eurasian populations of domestic livestock, since llamas never spread beyond the Andes; and llamas aren’t as cuddly as piglets and lambs and aren’t kept in such close association with people. (You may not think of piglets as cuddly, but human mothers in the New Guinea highlands often nurse them, and they frequently live right in the huts of peasant farmers.)

http://discovermagazine.com/1992/oct/thearrowofdiseas137