6 ms·

It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.

ErigmolCt 2mo ago
The really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsed
IncreasePosts 2mo ago
The same thing happened to the native North Americans too. When the Pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts in 1620, the whole region between there and maine had been reduced in population by 90+% due to a plague inadvertently brought by traders
- TimedToasts 2mo ago
  The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.
  - culi 2mo ago
    > A lack of resistance and no sanitation Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement. The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
    - InTheArena 2mo ago
      This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris. Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads. Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
      - culi 2mo ago
        Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks. Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeological-record-reveals-about-epidemics-throughout-history/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi... I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
        InTheArena 2mo ago
        I didn;t say that it didn't - in fact, the reality was mass casulty events where common in a way that is unthinkable. We do _ in fact_ have plenty of mass graves for colonists. The lack of evidence of the same on the American Indian side makes me skeptical of the whole narrative. i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
dkga 2mo ago
Not all - it is very likely this large Amazonian civilization perished before the Iberian colonists arrived in the region. For example, these geoglyphs mapped in the (super interesting!) paper are dated 2k years before the Europeans first arrived in Brazil.
culi 2mo ago
The Aquiry civilization (that this paper is about) actually ceased (either due to collapse or people changing their mind about that way of life, who knows) between 850 and 1000 CE. And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  I mean people from the old world.
- NuclearPM 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - esseph 2mo ago
    Name fits.
  - ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
    I'm not a moderator, but this is not the way to engage here, and your profile seems to have a lot of the same. You should peruse the comments section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or at least try and bring a little more effort to the conversation. You can make the same point in a way that adds light rather than heat.
    - youaremidwit 2mo ago
      [dead]
  - shwaj 2mo ago
    You could be more charitable. They did say “or” which you omitted in your quote, and also “who knows”. There are possibilities too. In my view, the primary contribution of that comment was to clarify the time frame.
PeterHolzwarth 2mo ago
It really is a strange and horrific metaphor, analogy, and parable about the effects of isolation - made all the more distressing because it wasn't intentional. It was just our broader ancestors going about their business as normal people.
- dyauspitr 2mo ago
  Yeah, for the most part, I mean there are tales about small pox ridden blankets being intentionally given to the Native Americans, but I don’t know if those are apocryphally or not. Either way it’s not like we had vaccines and immunization back then it would’ve happened anyways.
  - paimapi 2mo ago
    there are recorded incidents: https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act there was also active ethnic cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-american-genocide-its-legacy-and-survivors https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-a... "He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.” https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-act-genocide-native-americans/ https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-... "Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government." see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigenous_peoples#Denial_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigen...
applicative 2mo ago
Spain and Portugal were under Umayyad colonization when this civilization died.
digitalsurgeonz 2mo ago
yes the disease like European virus which killed the natives in cold blood.
tdiff 2mo ago
I've always imaginged that Amazonia is a hive of all types of diseases. I'd rather wonder how did they manage to survive there.

ErigmolCt 2mo ago

The really haunting part is that Europeans often arrived late enough to see the collapse, but not early enough to understand what had collapsed

IncreasePosts 2mo ago

The same thing happened to the native North Americans too. When the Pilgrims showed up in Massachusetts in 1620, the whole region between there and maine had been reduced in population by 90+% due to a plague inadvertently brought by traders

TimedToasts 2mo ago
The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.
- culi 2mo ago
  > A lack of resistance and no sanitation Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement. The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
  - InTheArena 2mo ago
    This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris. Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads. Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
    - culi 2mo ago
      Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks. Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeological-record-reveals-about-epidemics-throughout-history/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi... I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
      - InTheArena 2mo ago
        I didn;t say that it didn't - in fact, the reality was mass casulty events where common in a way that is unthinkable. We do _ in fact_ have plenty of mass graves for colonists. The lack of evidence of the same on the American Indian side makes me skeptical of the whole narrative. i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.

dkga 2mo ago

Not all - it is very likely this large Amazonian civilization perished before the Iberian colonists arrived in the region. For example, these geoglyphs mapped in the (super interesting!) paper are dated 2k years before the Europeans first arrived in Brazil.

culi 2mo ago

The Aquiry civilization (that this paper is about) actually ceased (either due to collapse or people changing their mind about that way of life, who knows) between 850 and 1000 CE. And WDYM "anyone"? Obviously plenty of people met them and plenty of civilizations derived from them. By the time Europeans got there, the Amazon Basin was home to 5-10 million people (some models push it up to 20 million). I'm sure traces of that culture and history still mark those indigenous cultures today

dyauspitr 2mo ago
I mean people from the old world.
NuclearPM 2mo ago
[flagged]
- esseph 2mo ago
  Name fits.
- ToValueFunfetti 2mo ago
  I'm not a moderator, but this is not the way to engage here, and your profile seems to have a lot of the same. You should peruse the comments section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html or at least try and bring a little more effort to the conversation. You can make the same point in a way that adds light rather than heat.
  - youaremidwit 2mo ago
    [dead]
- shwaj 2mo ago
  You could be more charitable. They did say “or” which you omitted in your quote, and also “who knows”. There are possibilities too. In my view, the primary contribution of that comment was to clarify the time frame.

PeterHolzwarth 2mo ago

It really is a strange and horrific metaphor, analogy, and parable about the effects of isolation - made all the more distressing because it wasn't intentional. It was just our broader ancestors going about their business as normal people.

dyauspitr 2mo ago
Yeah, for the most part, I mean there are tales about small pox ridden blankets being intentionally given to the Native Americans, but I don’t know if those are apocryphally or not. Either way it’s not like we had vaccines and immunization back then it would’ve happened anyways.
- paimapi 2mo ago
  there are recorded incidents: https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ https://project1492.org/small-pox-blankets/ the controversy is mostly around whether or not it was a systemic, pervasive form of biological warfare. the evidence base is fairly small but needs to be considered in context of Native American cultural habits around durable recordkeeping (eg trade ledgers) vs colonial, and if colonists would record such an act there was also active ethnic cleanses and genocides committed by the US government repeatedly throughout US history too and those are very well documented, all dotted with stories as bad or actively and intentionally worse than biological warfare https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-american-genocide-its-legacy-and-survivors https://news.uoregon.edu/content/historian-examines-native-a... "He was speaking in opposition to a treaty that proposed the Cherokees sell off 20 million acres of homeland—a large portion of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This tension exploded with the commencement of independence hostilities in July 1776; some Cherokee leaders sided with the British, and in response the US charged thousands of colonial troops with “the utter extirpation of the Cherokee Nation.” https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-act-genocide-native-americans/ https://sites.uab.edu/humanrights/2017/04/17/indian-removal-... "Throughout American history, the treatment of indigenous Native Americans has violated numerous articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These violations resulted in the loss of numerous Native American homelands, the Cherokee being only one example, and the genocide of numerous other smaller tribes since the beginning of European colonization. This is largely due to Eurocentric ideals, like the natural law of the Puritan worldview, which elevates the status of European peoples over that of indigenous, Native American peoples through a biased worldview. This mindset is so pervasive and powerful that it still prevails today, evidenced by modern films and television that paint Native American tribes as savage, ignorant and of ill intent toward the “white man”, and the policies of the current United States government." see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigenous_peoples#Denial_examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_genocides_of_Indigen...

applicative 2mo ago

Spain and Portugal were under Umayyad colonization when this civilization died.

digitalsurgeonz 2mo ago

yes the disease like European virus which killed the natives in cold blood.

tdiff 2mo ago

I've always imaginged that Amazonia is a hive of all types of diseases. I'd rather wonder how did they manage to survive there.