From the review of..
'1491'
"JEFFREY BROWN: So to the enormous question then of what happened to the land, what happened to the people, you talk about an epidemic that you call the worst demographic disaster in history.
CHARLES MANN: Well, it's actually a series of epidemics. What happened was that by historical quirk, there are hardly any large domestic land mammals in the Americas, and so the Indians didn't have many domesticated animals. They had dogs and llamas up in the Andes, and when people live in close proximity to animals, the way the Europeans did with their farm animals, animal diseases can what's called jump the species barrier and become human diseases.
And thus you have bovine rinderpest becoming measles; you have smallpox developing from horse pox or camel pox, depending which geneticist you talk to, bird flu, of course, becoming human flu.
And none of this took place in the Americas, and lots of it took place in Europe, so Europeans came over to the Americas and they brought inadvertently all these diseases with them to populations that not only didn't have diseases of their own, but also basically didn't have any of those kind of epidemic diseases and so didn't have any of the kind of cultural defenses against -- they didn't know about quarantine because if you don't ever have a plague, you don't need to know about quarantine.
And so these diseases when they came just swept through the Americas.
JEFFREY BROWN: And decimated a huge proportion of the population.
CHARLES MANN: Right. It was just a horrendous catastrophe, like nothing before or after it. Half of the world's population died." |
