The Great Dying of the Americas

in 1502, Nicolás de Ovando, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola, massacred some six to seven hundred Indians from the chiefdom of Higüey who had rebelled in protest of the Spanish use of attack dogs

On Hispaniola only twenty to thirty thousand adult Tainos remained alive, far fewer than the pre-Columbian population of at least several hundred thousand and by some estimates as high as 8 million.

Soon after landing, some of the crew became ill, probably from influenza, and infected the Native populations of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica.

The expedition’s goal was not to kill Indians, but as its leaders and men pursued their main objective—acquiring gold—they did exactly that.

Violence, then, was central to Spanish colonization in the Caribbean, although far more Indians died from disease, malnutrition, and starvation.

By 1542 , the Native population of Hispaniola was only two thousand.

War, for example, can result in displacement, impoverishment, and social stress, thus increasing vulnerability to pathogens.

When smallpox broke out in Virginia in 1696 it spread rapidly along networks of human contact that had been shaped by violence, deracination, and deprivation, destroying Indian communities from the Carolinas to the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi River to Illinois.

to a low point (often referred to as “the nadir”) of about 250,000 sometime around 1900.

Since then, the population of American Indians has steadily increased.

but it is also due to the efforts of Native individuals, families, and nations to rebuild their communities.

Despite overall demographic growth, however, it remains possible to characterize at least some U.S. actions toward Indians during the twentieth century as genocidal.

The Spanish Crown began by prohibiting Indian slavery in 1542, and this ban gave rise to number of subterfuges and euphemisms meant to get around the law.

Europeans had the upper hand because of their superior warfare capabilities, especially horses but also firearms.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries powerful equestrian societies in North America like Comanches and Utes had taken control of much of the traffic and became regional suppliers of slaves to other Indians as well as to Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans.

Because the Spanish Crown prohibited Indian slavery practically since the beginning of colonization, masters and colonists took pains to disguise their activities and resort to euphemisms and subterfuges.

Following the first disease outbreak in 1497 CE on the island of Hispaniola, the first census for the whole island was established in 1508 CE and arrived at 60,000 indigenous people

Most estimates are between 300,000 and 500,000 people in the Caribbean before European contact

Following the first comprehensive census in 1568 CE the population of central Mexico had already declined to 2.7 million

For central Mexico (the most populous region in Mexico) a population of 25.3 million in 1519 CE has been estimated from tribute records (Borah and Cook, 1969)

Here the most devastating outbreak occurred in 1520 CE

By 1620 CE about 670,000 indigenous people remained in the Inca heartland, which is equivalent to a depopulation of 93% based on an initial population of 9 million (Cook, 1981).

Such diseases included smallpox, measles, influenza, the bubonic plague, and later malaria, diphtheria, typhus and cholera.

Most of these diseases originated from domesticated farm animals from Europe to which Native Americans had no prior exposure

However, despite this there is no evidence for a causal relationship between genetic differences and the increased severity of the impacts of diseases

these epidemics were introduced by European settlers and African slaves and were passed on to an indigenous population that had not been previously exposed to these pathogens

societal breakdown following ongoing war, slavery and famine due to shortage of healthy labor force likely increased the potency of epidemics in the Americas

Loss rates ranging from 40% (McEvedy and Jones, 1977) to 95% (Dobyns, 1966), with Denevan’s (1992a,b) more recent update producing a robust initial population estimate of 54 million (similar to our 60.5 million) that results in a 90% decline to 5.6 million in 1600 CE.

From 119 published regional population estimates we calculate a pre-1492 CE population of 60.5 million

The lower range of population estimates for North America lies between 900,000 and 2.4 million, based on tribe-by-tribe counts for the period 1600 CE to mid-1800 CE

has been criticized for its assumptions on food acquisition strategies

did not make any judgement on their relative quality.

All have concluded that infectious diseases, introduced by Europeans and Africans, played a decisive role.

theories of immunological determinism in the American context also have “instrumentality,” deflecting attention away from moral and political questions.

Indian populations declined by as much as 95 percent in the first century after the arrival of Christopher Columbus

Our results indicate that divergence of MeV from RPV occurred around the 11th to 12th centuries.

Our analyses show that the measles virus potentially arose as early as the sixth century BCE, possibly coinciding with the rise of large cities.

the timescale of emergence of the causative agent, variola virus (VARV), and how it evolved in the context of increasingly widespread immunization, have proven controversial

We estimate that the currently circulating strains of YFV arose in Africa within the last 1,500 years and emerged in the Americas following the slave trade approximately 300–400 years ago.

Our estimates of divergence time between the South American populations and their likely sources favor a likely introduction from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade.

it would kill women and children, not just warriors