3 ms·

Most of this happened centuries before the germ theory of disease. No one on either side had any real clue what was going on, and most probably thought it was

• anon84873628 2mo ago
  >Often the disease travelled faster than people, and when Europeans arrived, the natives were long since gone. I understand the gist of this statement with regards to the size and complexity of indigenous civilizations, but we need to be much more careful with the framing. Plenty of Native Americans (in both continents) survived the European diseases. but just looking at the North, the English colonists interacted heavily with Native Americans - hence the story of Thanksgiving. The "French and Indian War" pitted an alliance of the French and Indian nations against the English settlers. It was a deliberate genocide campaign in the 19th century (a good 300 years after initial European contact) that largely exterminated native cultures from what is modern USA. The current color of the continent is not some accident of "oh well we didn't know any better about disease". In Central and South America (and the far North), native cultures survived to a much greater extent and are still visible today.