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Pre-Columbian Contact with the New World


Lord Harry

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55 minutes ago, Tatetopa said:

Mostly not,  I'd don't think germ theory was around in the 1500's.  However I think there are cases of giving smallpox  infected blankets to Indians.  Piney could maybe answer that one.

A,erican troops did that on the Northern Plains. This may have been one of the earliest examples of germ warfare, and it was highly effective.

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On 7/29/2018 at 2:06 PM, Lord Harry said:

Yes, but there are no records from Mesoamerica for the first millennium AD. Who is to say that a similar catostrophic decimation didn't occur in those days? The Olmecs for example vanished without a trace. While this isn't Mesoamerica, it would appear that a similar fate befell the Nazca people of Peru. 

I am no expert in New World archaeology, so if I am wrong please show me, but based upon what I have read there were several New World societies, some of which were quite advanced, which disappeared during the first millennium AD.

This was somewhat later, but the Anasazi appear to have vanished as well.

The Olmecs didn't vanish without a trace, nor did the Nazca... any more than the Spartans, the ancient Egyptians, the Harappans, etc.

They become subsumed by a later culture but they did not vanish like snow on a summer day.

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1 hour ago, Tatetopa said:

Mostly not,  I'd don't think germ theory was around in the 1500's.  However I think there are cases of giving smallpox  infected blankets to Indians.  Piney could maybe answer that one.

A questionable story.

Quote

The Indians destroyed several of the smaller British forts, but Fort Pitt (present-day Pittsburgh, Pa.) held out under the command of Captain Simeon Ecuyer, a 22-year veteran Swiss mercenary in the British service. Ecuyer, whose native language was French, also spoke German, the predominant language of his native Switzerland; the British had retained him because many settlers in Pennsylvania also spoke German. Smallpox had broken out among the British garrison, and during a parley on June 24, 1763, Ecuyer gave besieging Lenape warriors several items taken from smallpox patients. “We gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the smallpox hospital,” Captain William Trent of the garrison militia wrote in his journal. “I hope it will have the desired effect.”

Smallpox did break out among the Indian tribes whose warriors were besieging the fort—19th-century historian Francis Parkman estimated that 60 to 80 Indians in the Ohio Valley died in a localized epidemic. But no one is sure whether the smallpox was carried by Ecuyer’s infected blankets or by the clothing Indian warriors had stolen from the estimated 2,000 outlying settlers they had killed or abducted.

Source

That's the only known incident of deliberately giving smallpox-infected items to the natives.

Harte

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22 hours ago, Harte said:

That's the only known incident of deliberately giving smallpox-infected items to the natives.

Only once, well I guess we are OK then.    Seems like kmt_sesh might have another example above.   But of course we did that to each other in Europe a number of times and the Middle East too.  Shooting plague deaths over city walls seemed to be a custom from the earliest time we had catapults.  I don't know that for certain, never read a reliable source, just popular histories.

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On July 29, 2018 at 9:12 PM, Harte said:

Any earlier plague would have left the natives with a higher immunity that they exhibited during the known plague.

Harte

As always, good point Harte...but as every poodle is a dog, not every dog is a poodle.  In other words ,every bug is a plague,but not every "plague" is the same bug ?   ..just something to consider?

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11 minutes ago, lightly said:

As always, good point Harte...but as every poodle is a dog, not every dog is a poodle.  In other words ,every bug is a plague,but not every "plague" is the same bug ?   ..just something to consider?

We had no resistance to ANY zoonotic disease. Which comes from living close with domesticated animals.  Even our dogs had their place and it was not near food or sleeping areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis

 

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