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Old 11-14-2012, 03:11 PM   #115
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rain Man View Post
I think I mentioned this in a thread a while back, but the thing I don't get is why this was a one-way deal. Europeans show up and cough, and 90 million Native Americans start dying. But why didn't the Native Americans cough and kill all of the arriving Europeans?

And presumably no diseases went back to Europe with Columbus and John Smith and Verrazano and all those guys. Why not? Why didn't Europe take the same disease beatdown that the Native Americans took? Was it just sheer luck? Did the Viking expeditions somehow inoculate Europeans? And why didn't the Vikings start the North American plague? Or is it possible that something like the Black Plague was carried from America with the Vikings and nailed the white folk 200 years earlier?
The Europeans lived in cramped conditions with a long history of animal husbandry. They had already been through multiple plagues and represented, genetically, the survivors of those plagues.
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