You Dirty Dirty Bastards

Okay, this is the last we’re going to hit on this topic in this book.  I promise.  So far we've established that 1492 was a pretty pivotal year for the Americas given that it marked the introduction of Old World diseases to the New World, resulting in a fucking apocalyptic catastrophe for Native Americans.  We've also established that this wasn't a one way street, but that disease, mostly in the form of syphilis, was also carried from the New World back to the Old World.  So, this brings up the final question that is hopefully rattling around in your heads.  No, not where you can get the best chicken wings.  What the hell is wrong with you?  The question should hopefully be, why is it that Old World diseases totally fucked the Native Americans, killing over 90 percent of their population, while New World diseases only killed about 5 percent of the European population before fizzling out?  That's a damn good question.  Well, it all comes down to immune systems and the fact that Europeans of the era were just really gross.

It just has to be said straight from the start, Europeans had better immune systems.  There, now it's out there.  Wait.  Before you freak the fuck out let me finish.  I know some of you are probably going to read this and think, man, that's racist as fuck.  Well, it's not.  Europeans having better immune systems had nothing to do with DNA.  It's not like one group was genetically superior to the other.  No, this was a matter of environment.  Specifically, three big environmental factors.

The first big factor was isolation. The people who became the Native Americans first crossed the Bering land bridge around 15,000 years ago.  This land bridge was soon after flooded by rising ocean levels, thanks to climate change and the end of the Ice Age, which effectively cut off any significant contact between the Old World and the New World until 1492.  As far as disease was concerned, the world was divided into two completely separate populations.  In both worlds, diseases developed, spreading as they do via trade networks and people migrating around.  The big difference was that the Old World had five times the population that the New World did, meaning there was a five times greater chance of diseases mutating, meaning there was a five times greater chance of one of the mutations creating some new and terrible plague.  It's just math.

Even if the New World and Old World had similar populations, the Old World still would have had a higher likelihood of developing more diseases.  This was due to the second factor, the domestication of animals.  The New World didn't have that many domesticated animals; mostly llamas, dogs, and turkeys; largely because they didn't have that much to work with.  In comparison, the Old World was filled to brim with domesticated animals, especially livestock.  This meant that a person in the Old World was much more likely to live in close proximity to these animals for long periods of time, and more importantly, in close proximity to their shit.  Fun fact, living in close proximity with other animals increases the chance of diseases jumping from one species to another.  More domesticated animals equates to a larger myriad of diseases over time.

The final factor wasn't something grand covering thousands of years of history, it was actually a rather short term fixation.  In the mid-1300's the Black Death swept Europe, killing an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the population, leaving a group of rather hardy survivors.  However, these survivors somehow got it into their heads that regular bathing, which was very common up until then, was bad for one's health.  Europeans of Columbus’ era avoided bathing at all cost, many never taking a bath even once in their entire lives.  They were all stinky dirty sons of bitches.  That’s what I'm trying to say.  Now combine that with the fact that even though many Europeans lived in rapidly growing cities, basic sanitation just wasn’t a thing, by which I mean shit was basically just everywhere.  Do you know what you end up with in these circumstances, aside from a lot of people literally pooping themselves to death?  You end up with a bunch of people with some pretty damn robust immune systems.  In comparison, the Native Americans kept themselves pretty clean and made a habit of not shitting in the same places from which they got their water.  Given all of these factors together, the end result of contact between the two groups was kind of inevitable.

So, what can we take from all of this?  Well, for one, things were going to be kind of fucked from the get go.  Aside from never ever having any contact between the Old World and the New World, bad shit was going to happen.  However, none of this of course should be taken as any type of excuse for the shitty ways Europeans treated Native Americans.  That was still fucked up.  There's a big difference between inadvertently getting someone sick and purposefully trying to fuck up their world.  I guess it just goes to show you that maybe we should all just start putting a little cow shit in our mouth’s every now and again.  I don’t know, it might not hurt. 

Image: https://picryl.com/media/children-b76161

Cupid's Disease

We've already covered back in good old 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue and proved himself to be a huge douchebag.  Beyond Chris' personal douchiness, we've also covered the inadvertent shit show that the spreading of European diseases had on the Americas.  What we haven't covered is the fact that old Columbus’ first contact was a two way street.  That’s right, shit came back as well. 

Now, it goes without saying that the Europeans got the better end of the stick that smarmy historians now call the Columbian Exchange.  It's pretty obvious given that they got to enjoy a plethora of great new foods, such as corn and potatoes, and that instead of almost completely getting wiped out by disease, they instead went on to dominate the world politically, economically, and culturally for centuries.  However, a bunch of delicious food is not the only thing Columbus and his crew brought back.  By the time Columbus and his boys arrived in the New World, they had been at sea for well over three months.  Now imagine a bunch of men who had only recently been convinced that they most certainly were probably going to die in the middle of the fucking ocean due to some mad man’s whim.  Now imagine that same bunch of men suddenly discovering themselves on a tropical island filled with topless women.  It's not hard to imagine what happened next.  What, you can't imagine?  Damn it you prude bastard, there was a lot of sex.  Did I really have to spell it out for you?  What’s next, do I have to mention that it was probably a mix of both consensual sex and rape?  Well it was.  You happy now?  History is all sorts of fucked up like that.   

Anyways, Columbus and his horny men came back to Spain in 1493, and being a horny crew, probably started hitting the brothels as soon as they arrived.  With their taste for the finer things in life sated, many then decided to quit being sailors in favor of becoming mercenaries to fight with the king of France, who was invading Italy, because that's just what Italy was there for back then.  Of course, as with any army, there would have been a significant group of prostitutes tagging along to sell their assets, and most likely quite of bit of copulation with the locals, both consensual and otherwise.  Again, history is just riddled with this kind of terrible shit.  It was all pretty standard for the day and age.  What wasn't standard was the fact that these sailors turned soldiers were collectively patient zero for the spread of a new and terrible disease which they had brought back from the New World.  A disease which today we call syphilis.

Syphilis today is not really considered that big of a deal, and even throughout most of history it was more of a slow burn than a firestorm, which was how it pretty much was for the Native Americans.  However, for the Europeans, whose immune systems had never seen it before, it was one of the most horrifying diseases ever imagined.  First a victim became covered in pustules, ulcers, and cysts from the top of their heads to the bottoms of their feet.  Then their flesh began to die, releasing a terrible stench and eventually peeling and sloughing off, exposing the muscle and bone beneath.  By this stage the victims would be in great agony, rotting and shambling around like some kind of living dead, before finally succumbing to death after a few months.  So, you know, not a very pleasant way to die, even in a time full of all sorts of terrible ways to go.  Over the next thirty years the disease spread like wildfire, killing five million people, which was an estimated five percent of Europe’s population at the time.  Millions of people literally fucked themselves to death.  Those who survived were left horrifically scarred. 

Luckily, after that point the disease mutate into the form we know today, which was less terrifying zombie, and more just a couple of sores and having your brain rot away over several decades.  Syphilis became a common disease throughout Europe from then on, infecting as much as twenty percent of the population at any given time.  In fact, our vision of the aristocracy of that era, think thick pancake makeup on both sexes and extravagant powdered wigs, was due to syphilis.  Pancake makeup was used to hide the sores and the wigs hid the fact that the only known treatment, mercury, made people's hair fall out.  Some of the greatest minds of the European Renaissance died insane thanks to syphilis.  The full threat was not ended until the invention of antibiotics in the 20th century.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portrait_of_Gerard_de_Lairesse_MET_1567.jpg

It’s A Mad Mad Mad Max World

When we picture Native Americans today, especially those in the United States, we probably imagine scattered tribes, doing their best to scratch a living off of the land while harmonizing with nature.  When we think of so-called great American civilizations, meaning those who threw up huge monuments and other such things that get archeologists and local tourist bureaus all hot and heavy, we mostly just think of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca; three groups that got beat up pretty early on by the Spanish.  The rest are just kind of thought of as simple farmers and stone axe wielding hunters and gatherers wandering around with feathers in their hair.  However, it wasn’t always this way, and as per usual, how we are picturing history doesn’t really have much context with what really happened.          

As we've gone through before, back in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and upon discovering the New World (known as the Old World if you lived there) he set out to see how big of a dick he could be.  We don't need to go again into all the ways Columbus was an asshat, but to be fair to the man, the largest disaster caused by his discovery was in no way actually his fault.  I'm of course talking about the spread of diseases, like small pox and measles, to the Native Americans.  It cannot be overemphasized how big of a fucking deal this was from a historical perspective.  Prior to Columbus' arrival, it was estimated that North and South America had a population roughly on par with Europe's, which was around 90 million people.  The Americas were filled with advanced civilizations, just like every other part of the world.  Groups that not only built magnificent cities and cultivated wide areas of cropland, but also engaged in the usual collection of laws, negotiations, trade, and war that has marked the entirety of human history.  That all changed starting in 1492, probably because some asshat Spaniard failed to cover his mouth when he coughed.  Europeans weren’t exactly the cleanest people back then.  Within 150 years of first contact, it’s estimated that 90 percent of the Native American population had dropped dead, almost all due to Old World diseases.   

It's hard to imagine how devastating this would have been to the civilizations that existed.  Everywhere the early Europeans landed their ships became a spark, which quickly spread deep into the interior along established trade routes.  To be fair to the Europeans, this was a time when their doctors believed that diseases were caused either by god being mad or because the stars were aligned in some weird way.  They really didn’t have any idea how illnesses spread from one person to another, and they definitely didn’t understand things like immunity and germs.  When diseases that were relatively mild for them began mowing their way through the Native Americans, they pretty much just chocked it up to god not liking the natives for some reason and left it at that.  Now of course that is not to say that there weren’t some dicks who purposefully tried to get Native Americans sick, there most certainly were, but even if they hadn’t, the die was already cast.    

Imagine that over a relatively short period of time, 90 percent of the population today in the United States just died off.   What would that do to our economy?  Our system of government?  Our culture?  If you’re not saying it would probably totally fuck things up, you’ve probably never seen a single movie about the apocalypse.  By the time the Pilgrims arrived on the scene in 1620, the vast majority of the Native Americans were already dead.  The native societies found by the Pilgrims, though still impressive given their level of culture and organization, weren’t the height of New World civilization.  They were the post-apocalyptic survivors, trying desperately to rebuild all that had been lost.  As the Europeans pushed further into the interior, they declared that the land they found must have been blessed by god, for there were countless clearings ready for the plow and seemingly virgin forests that had never been cut.  Now imagine what your lawn would like if you didn’t mow it for a year.  Now imagine what everything would look like if 90 percent of the people in the world disappeared.   

The Native American groups that best survived this Armageddon were the ones that were the most scattered.  The ones that lived in the most remote places.  This isolation helped them survive the longest.  However, unfortunately the Europeans continued to expand as time continued, moving forward into what they saw as an empty and mostly unclaimed world, spreading new rounds of pestilence and starting wars with any who dared defy them.  The Native Americans they fought were the plucky survivors of the plague, but without any historical context, the Europeans saw them as nothing but savages. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Conquista-de-Tenochtitlan-Mexico.jpg