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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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The main thing that native Americans lacked that made their conquest inevitable was being able to handle European germs.
Imagine if 300 million Americans died just cause and the ones who didn’t insisted you should convert to Christianity to be saved (germ theory was not really common knowledge).
Did colonists die of “new” germs that they caught from Native Americans? You always hear about Europeans bringing diseases to the Americas, but not the other way around.
Disease requires mass concentration of people which was less common in America. They did transfer syphilis to Europe though.
Basically, and I'm generalizing but still, all those diseases that Europeans brought over to the Americas came from domesticated European animals. On the other hand there weren't really domesticated animals in the Americas (lamas but barely). So there weren't really epidemic diseases in the Americas to infect Europeans.
This one fact basically explains the entirety of the history between these two hemispheres.
Yeah, Europeans caught syphilis from indigenous Americans, and without any existing immunity to it there was a genuinely terrifying pandemic in Europe with worse symptoms than present-day forms of the disease (and no penicillin to treat it).
But indigenous Americans caught smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus from Europeans, so it really wasn't a fair exchange.
That's where syphilis came from?? Man, I really do learn so much from this community.
It’s cause of how European agriculture worked and how they essentially helped create new pathogens.
European medieval peasants were just soooo filthy