RE: Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy wasn't)
October 16, 2015 at 8:31 pm
(This post was last modified: October 16, 2015 at 8:35 pm by Regina.)
(October 16, 2015 at 8:18 pm)Minimalist Wrote: It might be even deeper than that, Yeaux. The Vikings would have been as much carriers of European diseases as Columbus' crew. Yet, there is no evidence of disease outbreaks from Viking times. Had there been, one would have expected to see some degree of resistance to those diseases when Europeans did arrive.
I've seen some attempts at explanations for this before. A common belief is that, because the groups of Natives the Vikings encountered were so isolated and small, it wasn't as easy for the viruses to spread throughout the whole continents. Thus any Natives who got infected by the Vikings would have died before they could spread it.
When the Spanish arrived later, they arrived in Mesoamerica and The Andes, which were densely populated with large cities - the perfect conditions for disease to spread (which Greenland and Northern Canada have never had).
"Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the road, and then getting hit by an airplane" - sarcasm_only
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
