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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

It would have almost no effect. Unless the Americas were completely isolated from Eurasia, everyone would have died anyway. The Americas were not conquered by force of arms, but by disease. A common pattern: send an expedition, which discovers cities, towns and gardens. Send another expedition years later: find nothing. I highly recommend the book 1491, which is a great historical account.

There was absolutely nothing (short of complete isolation until the development of modern medicine) which would have prevented the Indians from dying out. Even if the Europeans did nothing but bring candy, puppydogs and fireworks in trade for furs, the puppydogs would have carried diseases deadly to American Indians.

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Another really good book is William McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples". It discusses worldwide effects of diseases on populations, not just the Americas, and is very readable. He also points out that in populations with heavy disease loads, most are exposed as children often developing immunity thereafter, while newly exposed populations lose adults to the disease, which causes greater economic and military debility to the society.

Why didn't it work symmetrically? Shouldn't the diseases going the other way have wiped out Europe? The only major disease I can recall coming from the Americas was syphilis.

Maybe there were more diseases in Europe? It's not like diseases never hit Europe from other places (e.g. The Black Plague).

In simple terms, the Old World had a larger human population pool, with a longer history of settlement, and more domesticated animals (i.e. vectors for disease).

Or in simplest terms, Old World germs were way nastier. (Contrast: African settlement.)

See Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond (which some disagree with, but an interesting book nonetheless). He says that the key factor was the large number of animal species in the old world that could be domesticated. So Europeans all had constant contact with animals and their diseases, which led to (1) more diseases, and (2) greater resistance (among those that survived). While in the Americas, with their relative lack of such species, the people had both fewer diseases (so they were less of a threat to the Europeans) and less resistance (so the Europeans were more of a threat to them).

Eurasia was a cesspool. The Americas were not.

Eurasians/Africans evolved an immune system capable of fighting infectious diseases because for thousands of years they lived in close quarters with domesticated animals and other people.

American Indians had few domesticated animals (only Llamas and Alpacas, I think), minimal over overcrowding and hence had few infectious disease. This caused them to be tall and healthy by contemporary Eurasian standards, but also made them prone to illness.

For much the same reason, I got food poisoning twice in two weeks in Egypt but my (Asian) Indian girlfriend came away unscathed.

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