When I went I grade school I, and everyone else, learned that immediately after Europeans discovered the new world huge segments of the native population died from the European diseases to which they had no immunity. Smallpox was especially devastating. Lately the Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto has been reevaluating the records of the time. He has suggested that the epidemics were not European in origin. This is interesting in itself and is also interesting because it contradicts the old theory, which is much more politically correct. He believes the deaths were caused by a hemorrhagic fever (related to ebola).

Below is an excerpt from a Discovery Magazine article on the subject (online at http://discovermagazine.com/2006/feb/megad...t:int=1&-C= )
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To prove anything beyond a hunch, Acuna-Soto knew he would need good forensic science. He considers himself fortunate to have found the work of Francisco Hernandez.

Hernandez, personal physician to Philip II of Spain, was named Proto-Médico de su magestad de todas las Indias in 1576. He was, in effect, the surgeon general of New Spain.

"Philip sent him to Mexico to see what he could learn of native medicines," says Acuña-Soto. "Hernandez learned five Indian languages and wrote 50 volumes based on his own observations and interviews with hundreds of Indians. He performed autopsies on many of the victims of the 1576 epidemic. But the books arrived back in Spain just after Philip II's death. Philip III considered the project too expensive to publish, and the manuscript disappeared for 400 years. Around 1950 it resurfaced in the Hacienda Library in Madrid."

Six years later, Mexican physician German Somolinos d'Ardois published an account of that manuscript. Although Hernandez's descriptions of what he saw were rendered in an unsophisticated Latin, Somolinos d'Ardois was able to conclude that Hernandez considered the 1576 epidemic different from those that had come earlier.

Acuña-Soto sent the text of the original Latin manuscript to a friend, a physician working with the Centers for Disease Control in Washington, D.C., who was also a Greek and Latin scholar. The new translation he got back described cocolitzli in terms that did not match any Old World disease:

The fevers were contagious, burning, and continuous, all of them pestilential, in most part lethal. The tongue was dry and black. Enormous thirst. Urine of the colors of sea-green, vegetal green, and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale. Pulse was frequent, fast, small, and weak—sometimes even null. The eyes and the whole body were yellow. This stage was followed by delirium and seizures. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery. The blood that flowed when cutting a vein had a green color or was very pale, dry, and without serosity. . . . Blood flowed from the ears and in many cases blood truly gushed from the nose. . . . This epidemic attacked mainly young people and seldom the elder ones.

"This was certainly not smallpox," Acuña-Soto says. "If they described something real, then it appeared to be a hemorrhagic fever."

In the early 17th century 1/3rds of the Coastal Algonquians from Virginia to New Brunswick were wiped out by a form of Hepatitis not smallpox as originaly thought. How they determined this was by genetic testing on the modern populations of Abanaki, Rappahannock, Munsee, Nanticoke, Shinnacock, Piscataway (Kanahwa) and Wampanoag. 3 seperate smallpox epidemics sweeped through my tribe's home area between 1664 to 1677. It nearly wiped out the village MaXalahk Allawiss (Big Thicket) in the place I now live(Alloway). That village is now 3 horse farms.

Lapiche

edit: Sentence stucture boo boo

Thats what happens when you don't wash your hands after going to the washroom.

Given the timing, I suspect that the smallpox epidemics you're referring to were the result of European contact. There were quite a few Europeans on the east coast by 1640. Europeans had some level of resistance to smallpox after millenia of natural selection. Some were totally immune because they'd had cow pox. Native Americans were lactose intolerent so they never got into raising cattle, and there hadn't been any natural selection, so they had no immunity at all.

How could they tell from genetic testing?

certain diseases can alter the DNA resulting in a an apparent mutation of the genes of any survivor of said diseases....whether or not Hep is one of these, i dont know.....i know syphilis can leave genetic markers......

I thought it was more like an element found in the body rather than a genetic modification. Although I didn't think DNA alterations could be modified in such a short period of time.