The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.

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culi an hour ago | parent [-]

> A lack of resistance and no sanitation

Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.

The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed

Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.

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InTheArena 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris.

Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.

Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.

	▲	culi 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks. Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2024802118 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1071659/ https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/06/15/what-the-archaeologi... I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it