The many-headed Hydra is back, this time in the form of a video homage to Guns, Germs, and Steel courtesy of CGPGrey and Audible. At the end of the video CGPGrey calls GG&S “the history book to rule all history books”. He cites Diamond’s work extensively and, with the aid of fun graphics, tries to explain the apparent one-way transfer of infectious disease after contact. The ideas presented in the video are not new, they were outlined in GG&S almost twenty years ago, and Diamond borrowed extensively from Alfred Crosby’s 1986 Ecological Imperialism for his central thesis. Check out an earlier post for more links to previous discussions.

If GG&S is the history book to rule them all then, like Tolkien’s One Ring, GG&S is an attractive but fundamentally corruptive influence. Here I’ll briefly explain several of the issues while focusing on one key assumption of the video: the New World was a disease-free paradise.

A Virgin Population and a Disease Free Paradise

I’m going to quote from this recent post to explain several aspects of the disease transfer issues. The domestic origins/”virgin soil” hypothesis, with the corresponding catastrophic population decline in the Americas, relies on several assumptions. Here I will briefly discuss the notion of a disease free paradise, the application of a post hoc fallacy, and the tendency to divorce the impact of disease from other aspects of colonialism.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

The discussion of Native American population trends after contact is plagued by a prevalent post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Earlier historians assumed archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence of population dispersal in the protohistoric period was caused by introduced pathogens. The common perspective held if a site was abandoned after Europeans arrived, it must have been abandoned due to disease. Similarly, historians read de Soto’s retelling of the Plague of Cofitachequi and assumed the population perished from introduced infections. Other historians read colonial accounts of Native American dispersal due to disease, and value those written sources more highly than ethnohistorical accounts placing the blame on warfare and territorial displacement. For example, consider a 1782 address by Cherokee Chiefs to the commissioners of the United States…

Look back and recollect what a numerous and warlike people we were, when our assistance [was] asked against the French on the Ohio- we took pity on you then, and assisted you. We have been continually since, decreasing, and are now become weak. What are the causes? War, and succeeding invasions of our country.

In the past 20 years, however, the field is stepping back from the assumption of infectious disease spread without concrete evidence of epidemics. We are looking at the protohistoric period in the context of greater processes occurring in the decades and centuries leading up to contact. What we see is the continuation of population stasis, or dispersal, or aggregation that typified the centuries leading up to contact. This pattern, not the completely novel system we might expect with catastrophic disease loss, describes the centuries after contact. In North America the long view shows a vibrant population continuing to change and adapt as they had before, not one reeling from catastrophic waves of disease advancing ahead of early entradas.

A Disease Free Paradise

The death by disease alone narrative relies on an outdated perception of the Americas as a disease-free paradise. We know populations in the Americas were subject to a wide variety of intestinal parasites, Chagas, pinta, bejel, tick-borne pathogens like Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, syphilis, tuberculosis, and all manner of zoonotic pathogens. Two of the most devastating epidemics to hit the Valley of Mexico after contact were the result of cocoliztli, a hemorrhagic virus believed to be native to the New World. According to Francisco Hernandez, the Proto-Medico of New Spain and former personal physician of King Phillip II, the 1576 epidemic caused headaches, high fever, black tongues, dark urine, severe abdominal and thoracic pain, and profuse bleeding from the nose, eyes, and mouth. These symptoms are not consistent with any of the European or African diseases introduced to Mexico in the 16th century. Cocoliztli spread widely and quickly, with death occurring in 3-4 days from onset of initial symptoms. In addition to the devastating 1545 and 1576 epidemics, ten lesser cocoliztli epidemics flared up in the century after contact, striking in 1559, 1566, 1587, 1592, 1601, 1604, 1606, 1613, 1624, and 1642.

Cocoliztli alone defied Grey’s position of a disease free New World, and the journey of syphilis likewise supports a more nuanced view of disease exchange. Though the history of syphilis is often disputed, current research suggests a New World origin for the pathogen that burned its way through Europe in the wake of contact (Harper et al., 2011; Tampa et al., 2014). We are constantly making new discoveries about Native American health in the New World. Just this year at a national anthropological conference researchers presented new skeletal evidence of the antiquity of syphilis in Western Mexico. Bioarchaeologists routinely find evidence of infection on New World skeletal remains before contact. For example, at the Larsen site 26% of foragers and 84% of sedentary agriculturalists show skeletal evidence of bacterial infection. At the Toqua site 77% of infants had periosteal reactions indicating bacterial infections (Kelton, 2007. While Grey and Diamond advocate the Old World exceptionalism of circulating childhood diseases, the rate of bacterial infections among the youngest members of this cemetery sample suggests New World infants were not free from childhood afflictions.

Playing host to any number of parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and ectoparasites is the natural state of all animals, including humans. We make tasty hosts. The bioarchaeological, genetic, and historical evidence shows copious evidence of disease afflicting inhabitants of the New World. While some pathogens didn’t make the journey from Asia, >15,000 years is sufficient time for novel New World diseases to jump to a new primate host. The balance of evidence suggests humans in the New World, like humans everywhere since the origin of our species, encountered infectious agents, and gained immunity or died in the processes or lived with their chronic infections. The evidence also suggests the existence of at least two home-grown plagues, contrary to the claims of the video, and one America-pox that followed conquistadores home.

As an aside, the myth of a virgin populace also holds that Amerindians lacked both the adaptive immunity and immunological genetic variation needed to ward off novel pathogens. One commonly cited reason for Native American susceptibility to disease after contact is the lack of genetic diversity in immunologically important loci, specifically HLA alleles. In the past it was hypothesized this decreased variability could decrease immune response, or allow for a specific pathogen to spread through the homogeneous population with more disastrous results. This remains a theoretical hypothesis, strongly influenced by the past dominance of the narrative of death by disease alone, and never proven. Like the elevated mortality seen in modern refugee populations, we have far more evidence for the toxic effect colonialism on host health than we do for an inherit weakness in Native American immune defense. Native Americans were not immunologically naïve Bubble Boys, they responded like any human population to smallpox, or measles, or influenza. What did influence the impact of disease, though, was the larger health context and the influence of colonial endeavors.

The focus on disease alone divorces infectious organisms from the greater context of colonialism. We must remember not only on the pathogens, but the changes in host biology and the greater ecological setting eventually allowed for those pathogens to spread into the interior of the continent. Warfare and slaving raids added to excess mortality, while simultaneously displacing populations from their stable food supply, and forcing refugees into crowded settlements where disease could spread among weakened hosts. Later reservations restricted access to foraged foods and exacerbated resource scarcity where disease could follow quickly on the heels of famine. Workers in missions, encomiendas, and other forms of forced labor depended on a poor diet, while simultaneously meeting the demands of harsh production quotas that taxed host health before diseases even arrived.

Human are demographically capable of rebounding after population crashes provided other sources of excess mortality are limited. The greater cocktail of colonial insults, not just the pathogens themselves, decreased population size and prevented rapid recovery after contact. A myopic focus on disease alone ignores the complex factors influencing Native American demography. For added insight into how the combination of warfare, slaving raids, territorial displacement, and resource scarcity all worked together to decrease host immunity as well as spread pathogens check out this case study on the US Southeast during the protohistoric.

Why didn’t Europeans get sick?

The question was asked in the video, and the viewer is left to assume Europeans did not fall ill in the New World, or at least that there was no America-pox to spread to the Old. Like the popular perception of history, the video fails to acknowledge that Europeans died in droves in the New World, and in many cases those deaths might have been from diseases native to the Americas.

When we read the accounts of early Spanish entradas in North America, the authors make specific mention of crew members becoming ill weeks after their arrival. Nutritional and physiological stress from poorly planned colonization attempts decreased their immune defense, leaving them vulnerable to all manner of illnesses. Ayllón's 1526 attempt to establish a settlement on the Santee River in South Carolina ended in disaster. Of the original 600 colonists, all but 150 died from exposure, malnutrition, and disease. Later, the 1528 Narváez entrada likewise suffered a series of unfortunate events in their attempts to find riches in Florida. 400 men landed in Tampa Bay, yet only four survived the trip to Florida. After a month of raiding Apalachee towns, members of the entrada began to sicken and Cabeza de Vaca says

there were not horses enough to carry the sick, who went on increasing in numbers day by day... the people were unable to move forward, the greater part being ill.

The sickness began only after Narvàez reached the population center at Aute, and struck those who stayed in the village, while sparing the party exploring the coast (Kelton, 2007).

Similarly, chroniclers of de Soto’s expedition make no mention of sickness among their number during their voyage to the mainland, nor in the first few months wintering near the Apalachicola River. In May of 1540, a full year after making landfall in Florida, the first illnesses are mentioned among members of the entrada. In the Appalachian highlands near the native town of Xualla many Spaniards became “sick and lame”. Further illnesses struck near Guaxule where Spaniards were sick with fever and wandered from the trail. By autumn of 1540, 102 members of the entrada perished from disease and warfare. Deaths from disease seemed to abate for two years until the entrada reached the shores of the Mississippi River. There, de Soto, a man who survived the invasion of Peru and more than two years of pillaging through the U.S. Southeast, was “badly racked by fever”. He died seven days later (Kelton, 2007).

Did members of the Ayllón, Narváez, and de Soto entradas perish from New World pathogens, or did they bring their own microbes with them, and perish as a result? We don't know for sure. The deaths began outside the incubation period for many common acute infections, giving us reason to suspect they did not bring those illnesses with them from the Caribbean, but rather encountered them in North America.

Similar European mortality events are noted in Jamestown, where of the > 3,500 who arrived from 1617-1622, only 1,240 were alive in 1622. The chief cause of death was endemic illness, and the term "seasoning" was commonly used to describe the disease transition new immigrants needed to endure before their survival in the New World was assured. In the past, the perception of the disease-free New World led to the assumption that seasoning illnesses were solely Old World imports. Given the growing evidence of disease in the Americas, we must consider the possibility that some seasoning pathogens spread from their neighbors in Tsenacommacah (“densely inhabited land”). As we dive into the primary sources we find abundant evidence of European mortality due to disease, but it will always be a little difficult to determine, with 100% certainty, that those illnesses afflicting Europeans were from Old World pathogens alone.

Wrapping Up

There is much more to cover, but I fear work may prevent me from writing further posts. I re-emphasize there are shelves of books, and reams of articles, about the wonderful complexity of Native American, European, and African interactions after contact. Guns, Germs, and Steel is not the history book to rule all history books. It may be a place to start, but if it is your one source please consider further reading.

Suggested Reading

Cameron, Kelton, and Swedlund, eds. Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America

Calloway One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark

Gallay The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717

Kelton Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715

Restall Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest