Moments of Permanence - In which the History Wars go cross-continental

From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 05:51 am (UTC) (Link)

The argument that American populations were particularly vulnerable is based on a combination of the low founding population, low HLA diversity (their immune systems varied far less from person to person), and the long period of isolation (also applicable to many/most island populations). Not to mention contemporary primary sources that point out excessive death rates compared to Europeans. Selection only works if there are existing beneficial alleles in the population to select for.

(Here's a table estimating the diversity on several immune system loci by population, by the way: http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/156/4/2119/F2)

And general scientific consensus is that the suite of Eurasian diseases were -not- extant on the American continents. There's no real argument about this at all, actually. Smallpox only showed up period around 12,000 years ago, and wasn't in Europe in ancient Greek times. Many of the diseases in question post-dated the period of isolation, only could become endemic in urban environments, and/or were acquired from livestock. I'm pretty sure measles was introduced to Australia by colonists too.

European populations had to deal with diseases spreading out of the Middle East and Africa all the time. Since new diseases were related to old ones, adaptations to previous disease waves were semi-helpful in responding to new ones. Even non-related diseases could do this. There's a good argument that the European HIV-resistance gene, CCR5, arose due to the Black Death, for instance. Because the Americans were relatively disease-free, they didn't have the constant selection pressure of the Old World, so even useful adaptations could be lost due to drift.

And even "resistant" European populations had massive mortality due to smallpox.

Yes, a population (and particularly an isolated one) can be killed off due to disease. It happens all the time in other species. Look what the chytrid fungus is doing to frogs.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 06:13 am (UTC) (Link)

Okay, slight misinterpretation there - but with lower population densities and lower trade epidemics can more easily sputter out than they could in 1950s -anywhere-. Especially if they're extremely virulent and kill most of their hosts. When the Pilgrims arrived, there was a nearby abandoned village site due to disease. De Soto's early expedition and the disappearance of the peoples he met is the other main point of evidence. I don't necessarily believe in the high pre-existing population estimates, but European diseases were hitting North America before serious colonization for sure.

Supposed deliberate biological warfare against Native Americans has mostly been debunked, by the way, except for one possible isolated incident. Theories of disease weren't developed enough at that time.

Relative to Europe, even the colonists were pretty disease free. Kids going for education in England died of disease with notorious frequency there because they hadn't been exposed as youngsters on their isolated farms. Since all Episcopal priests had to be ordained in London, this hit that denomination particularly hard.

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From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 06:28 am (UTC) (Link)

Please sign anonymous comments, to distinguish yourself from other anonymous commenters and to link you to other areas of discussion in which you've taken part.

Especially when you're attempting to continue the derailment of discussion. If you don't believe in the high population estimates, then other quibbles are irrelevant to the discussion about The Thirteenth Child.

In any case, none of what you've said contradicts what I've said. The Mann argument still requires mortality rates greater than that of Ebola. No European plague on record is that deadly - no disease, period, even comes close to Ebola Zaire.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 08:05 am (UTC) (Link)

In America, smallpox at worst sure could be. (30-75% of the -total population- of a tribe dying in a single smallpox epidemic among Native Americans was more typical from the primary sources, but there were -lots- of successive epidemics). And this is long, long after smallpox was first introduced. Many other marginally less lethal diseases were also circulating as well.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/tribal.html?c=y&page=1
1837, long after introduction of smallpox, over 90% total mortality in one tribe of nearly two thousand people and over 50% overall across a large area.

That sort of mortality was possible among very isolated white people too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foula#15th_to_19th_centuries

Smallpox is a very, very serious disease, and if everybody comes down with it at once a lot of indirect deaths can also occur that wouldn't happen if there were people able to take care of the sick.

-Yrf

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From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 08:51 am (UTC) (Link)

Yes. Mortality can get that high in small areas, but over large areas, you're citing 50%. 95% mortality rates across two continents not happening.

Edited 2009-05-11 12:40 pm (UTC)

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From: delfinnium Date: May 11th, 2009 12:50 pm (UTC) (Link)

I don't believe that the native Americans died due to the disease - I do think they got infected, but I doubt they got entirely wiped out - wasn't there all that consistent annhiliation going on by the white settlers? Doesnt that count? Is the Mann hypothesis actually putting forward that all Indians are dead because they died of disease?

If so, *facepalm* It's on record that the whites systematically wiped out the Native Americans! And the Chinese/Asians who immigrated there.

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From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 12:55 pm (UTC) (Link)

Not quite. The Mann hypothesis is that before white settlement post-1492, pre-Columbian explorers had come by and brought disease that annihilated 95% of the huuuuge number of people who were there before, so the nomadic hunter-gatherers (with long-standing oral histories that treated their existence at the time as natural and contained no reference whatsoever to massive plagues) were in fact the remnants of a vast, populous, settled civilisation; the wilderness post-1492 settlers found was something that had grown back over the previous century or so.

His case is marginally stronger in South America, since there were large cities there, but his case is still pretty much entirely constituted of fail.

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From: delfinnium Date: May 11th, 2009 12:59 pm (UTC) (Link)

Considering that my grasp on American history is fail, I got mixed up.

Okay, so he said that American Indians were hanging around at huge numbers, then they got sick from... pre-Columbian explorers like... who? The Chinese? - and then all died at 95% rates?

Wow. You're right, even the fucking Black Death didn't manage that.

The white people will do ANYTHING to say that the land was empty so they can have damn frontier stories, wouldn't they? Up to and including saying that the population of natives on that same land were dying out first.

Wow. Just... wow. It niggled at me that a lot of Sci-fi is all about 'exploring the final frontier', but considering that a lot of Sci-fi is American based, with all the baggage that comes with it, I really shouldn't be surprised.

I just wish that American authors/publishing would stop acting like that's the only way sci-fi would be. Or the only way ANYONE would be.

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From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 01:05 pm (UTC) (Link)

Heh. That Star Trek essay I posted about actually covered some of that - the science fiction/frontier mythology thing is... interesting.

I actually explained things a little badly in my last comment. (We're outside my medicated hours, I'm afraid.) The idea is that the explorers who came around the same time Columbus himself did, like, say, Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors, visited huuuuuge civilisations etc, and *they* left diseases behind that killed everybody over the course of the 16th century; when 17th-century settlement started taking place (and, you know, started killing everybody) they were actually dealing with only a tiny remnant of the initial civilisation.

His argument is sort of that "real" natives were much more "civilised" than the ones found later - because, you know, they lived in large, dirty cities just like real people Europeans. (Which implies that the way of living they had was of course vastly inferior.) But it's seriously unsupportable.

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From: delfinnium Date: May 11th, 2009 01:11 pm (UTC) (Link)

(And Star Trek, a vision of the future, is full of white people. I dunno, i found it kind of sad that Sulu is supposed to represent All Of Asia. THanks, Star Trek people.)

I see. I hate that idea that civilised people live in giant dirty cities. Hell, if that was the case they would have had a couple of diseases to hand over themselves.

And just where is the remanents of these vast cities I'd like to know? Or were they movable cities? damn. THem Indians, so sneaky, hiding it all. >.<

No wonder the Native Americans don't trust the white scientists. I don't trust a lot of white scientist hypotheses (like 95% of East Asians are lactose intolerant! Where did they get THAT from?)

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 07:42 pm (UTC) (Link)

Well, de Soto met the Mound Builders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_builder_(people)) himself. Then, the next time someone went though, they were gone. Hidden megacities aren't the argument. The argument is that existing large village sites and their fields were historically underpopulated, undercultivated, and sometimes abandoned when settlers arrived.

There are some primary sources in there - the abandoned villages the Pilgrims found that they cheerfully assumed God killed for them, early colonial records of how bad the epidemics were, recorded death rates in central America, the de Soto expedition, early Pacific Northwest sea explorers finding the area decimated by smallpox...and smallpox did become endemic in the Americas. If smallpox comes along and wipes out 60% of the population every forty years or so, leaves the survivors disfigured/blind/somewhat infertile, and there's another couple of epidemics in the meantime with 10% mortality, not to mention the psychological toll from all that, yes that level of population crash over 130 years is plausible. The particular percentage claimed may be on the high end, but population crash happened.

Civilized people don't starve their children when they have the capacity for more intensive food production on their existing land (and they did). The Native Americans expanded to fill two continents. They didn't suddenly say "okay, that's enough kids" and start practicing draconian birth control. The way European settlers found the New World wasn't the way it had Always Been Since Time Immemorial (tm), and assuming that is ridiculous. Central American empires rose and fell. New crops were developed. Tribes and cultures split, merged, killed each other and displaced each other. The Navajo colonized the Southwest from northern Canada only a couple centuries before whites arrived. Etc.

Europeans were not any -less- obnoxious, murderous, etc to settled populations in Africa, India, or Asia. The reason they were able to displace Native Americans and smaller island populations as opposed to people on Old World continents is generally considered to be the vast and disproportionate impact of disease.

As for lactase deficiency in adults of some populations, this isn't a "white" hypothesis, it's something that can be directly measured by scientists of all races. It doesn't always translate into severe intolerance of smaller amounts of milk, but it's not something people made up for giggles either.

-Yrf

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 08:23 pm (UTC) (Link)

Wait, so the vast pre-Columbus North American population lived in giant crowded permanent cities... that left no archeological record? What?????

The problem with this theory isn't the hypothetical virulence of smallpox, the problem is that it's demonstrably idiotic. Huge settlements don't vanish without a trace- no trace means no huge settlements.

But the lactose intolerance thing is true. Different populations have different alleles, and most people in the world who aren't of Northern European, Middle Eastern, Mongolian, Fulani or Masai descent decrease their lactase production in adulthood to the point where it becomes difficult to metabolize large quantities of milk. This isn't a racist idea any more than the idea that there's a higher prevalence of sickle cell anemia in people of East African descent.

~ Another Mouse

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 11th, 2009 09:42 pm (UTC) (Link)

Nobody is claiming "Giant crowded permanent cities" in North America, just a reasonable density of towns and townsites. Sheesh. The high end population estimates for pre-contact North America (1491, Mann's stuff) are around .5 natives per square km or lower. The low end estimates are .04 natives per square km, which is nearly Greenlandic sparseness and even more ridiculous.

-Yrf

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From: lolaraincoat Date: May 12th, 2009 01:51 am (UTC) forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

Well ... it depends what you mean by "North America," right? Tenochtitlan - one of the biggest cities in the world, around 1500, and one of the biggest cities in the world right this minute, except that now we call it Mexico City - is right smack dab in the middle of the continent. It's just that the continent includes Mexico, you know? And nobody had to hide a damn thing. There were quite large cities in the Andes as well, and good-sized ones elsewhere. Not much north of the Rio Grande, though, was much larger than maybe 10,000 people. One of the several things that is driving me crazy about this latest episode of FAIL is that Wrede appears to have taken the bits of the Americas colonized by Brits as her unit of analysis. But we don't need to replicate that conceptual error.

Sami, your logic here is good and 1491 sounds almost Jared Diamond-esque in its dopiness. However, it is widely accepted among scholars of colonial and pre-colonial Latin American history (not my field - I'm a 20th-c specialist myself - but some of my best friends ...) that the Americas as a whole did indeed suffer what's delicately known as a "demographic collapse" after coming into sustained contact with Europeans, so, somewhere around 1500. This was mostly caused by diseases, though social chaos (from invasion, or more often as a consequence of the breakdown of complex systems of food production and distribution, etc., due to epidemic disease) played a part too. There were islands in the Caribbean that were entirely depopulated between the first and second trip Columbus made, perhaps because the breeding pairs of pigs Columbus left behind carried flu. Outside of islands, and very densely populated areas, the catastrophe was milder and happened more slowly. But yes, there certainly were large parts of the Americas which lost 95% of their populations.

I tell the undergraduates in Intro to Latin American History that the earliest dates of settlement in the Americas keep getting revised backward - I heard recently of settlements excavated in northern coastal Brazil that can be dated back 20,000 years - while estimates of the total population figure for the Americas before 1492 keep rising. So we can't say for sure how terrible the devastation over both continents was, between say 1500-1750. But 75-80% seems more or less plausible to me.

The best fast guide to most of this for English language users remains Alfred Crosby, The Colombian Exchange. It's quite outdated by now (I think he's been proved completely wrong about tuberculosis, for example) but nice and clear, anyway.

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From: sami Date: May 12th, 2009 01:55 am (UTC) Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

I'm not denying demographic collapse - I'm denying that it could have happened in such a way that there would be no record of it, and such that the Americas were in a state of reclaimed wilderness when European settlement took place.

I have noticed there's a strong assumption apparent that South America would be just like, say, Virginia. Which: no.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 12th, 2009 03:24 am (UTC) Re: forgive me for jumping in here when I totally agree with your larger points about Wrede, but ... (Link)

Yeah, that was a poorly phrased post at best, and the math was wrong too (though not by much). I think the relative estimates are Aztecs and south at 90% of the pre-Columbian population, and north of Aztecs 10% of the population.

My main point is that all four of the counterarguments in the above post about Native Americans and plague are at least slightly wrong, and for a lot of the pre-colonization dieoffs there is certainly evidence. The one in Massachusetts before the Pilgrims landed is very well attested.

As for megafauna, etc. - It's like the Neanderthals in Europe, or the hobbits in SE Asia. Sure, it's possible humans had nothing to do with all that, but it doesn't seem very plausible for animals that had survived a multitude of prior ice age cycles. Mammoths indeed survived many thousands of years past mainland extinction on an island north of Russia that was devoid of human habitation - until humans showed up. Much of the surviving non-domesticated megafauna in the world is in Africa, where it evolved alongside humanity. To blame overhunting specifically and exclusively seems invalid, but humans change their environment in other ways than mere hunting.

-Yrf

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From: bead Date: May 13th, 2009 10:14 pm (UTC) (Link)

There's actually a formula - I just read a book about smallpox called "Devil in the Freezer," about how we still have smallpox hanging around in labs and we're not entirely sure where all of it is - but anyway, as I recall, smallpox is most effective (effective meaning the virus does its job of reaching new people to infect) when it reaches a city or town of around 100,000 where there are lots of outlying suburbs or villages within a two-week walking distance. Once you hit the two-week-walk mark, evidently the numbers drop off considerably

(That's old school, there are different formulae for more modern settlements.)

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From: holyschist Date: May 11th, 2009 06:30 pm (UTC) (Link)

I have a huge problem with a lot of fictional epidemiology, because a disease's infection rate is almost always inversely correlated with its deadliness (common cold? very infectious. Ebola Zaire? not so much). Ebola Zaire has a 90% mortality rate, I believe one of the highest. But precisely because it's so deadly, it's hard to spread (people with ebola don't get much chance to walk around unknowingly infecting people) and easy to contain. In order for a disease to wipe out 95% of a population, it would have to be incredibly easily spread, with a reasonably long contagious incubation period followed by rapid lethality. That is...well, I don't know of any diseases in history that fit that description. Certainly not anything we know the Europeans could have brought with them. Generally, it's not in the reproductive interests of a virus or bacteria to kill its hosts too quickly, which is why diseases tend to become less lethal over time.

I vaguely recall reading something a while back about archaeological evidence for smallpox (I think?) in South America that was fairly convincing, but it's possible for diseases with wildlife reservoirs to disappear for generations, which would mean there wasn't any resistance in the generations the Spanish exposed to smallpox.

(And they still don't really know what the Tudor disease/sweating sickness was--did it really disappear? Did it evolve into something more familiar? Is it lurking in English livestock? But cases of diseases disappearing like that are INCREDIBLY rare.)

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From: sholio Date: May 12th, 2009 03:51 am (UTC) (Link)

I'm currently reading 1491, and while it's not devoid of problems, I'm generally finding it lucid, interesting and well-researched. I certainly agree with your point that the book is being used to support some pretty skeevy viewpoints in the current round of Fail, but the basic premise of the book is that the culturally-mainstream idea of the pre-1492 Americas as a virgin wilderness with a few roaming bands of hunters and the odd Mesoamerican city is one which denies agency to the human beings who originally settled these continents, lets Europeans off the hook for a staggering number of deaths from disease and famine between 1492 and the late 1500s, and does not seem to be supported by the historical evidence.

There is actually a lot of evidence for devastating epidemics that ravaged the peoples of the Americas in the first few decades post-contact. It's generally well established, for example, that the New England coast was nearly depopulated in just a few years by a series of epidemics that wiped out 90% of the population. A disease doesn't have to have an Ebola-class kill rate to have devastating secondary consequences from famine and political destabilization (although I know of villages in Alaska that were utterly depopulated during the 1918 flu; it had a global mortality rate around 2-5% but it was close to 100% in some populations).

None of this negates your basic point that "but Mann said!!!" is not an instant debate-winning trump card; and, also, I'm not deep enough into the book to have really gotten into the issue of wilderness management, so I don't know if there's major History!Fail lurking in the pages ahead. Thus far, megafauna extinctions haven't come up at all; just because South America was pretty heavily populated in 1000 A.D. doesn't mean diddly-squat as to what people were doing 10,000 years earlier and 5000 miles north.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: May 13th, 2009 01:10 pm (UTC) (Link)

I have to agree with friendshipper above, at least in part. I, too, am mid-1491, so it's entirely possible that I, too, have yet to get the parts that are really problematic. I haven't kept up with the various (and non-stop) racefail incidents, so I don't know precisely how the book is being used. Thus far, here's what I think: The book is fascinating. As friendshipper said, it's not without it's problems. And if it's being used to support some of the ideas you and other commenters brought up above, then I think it's being completely misused.

I think his 95% devastation figure is probably far too high, especially for a continents-wide figure, but he doesn't ignore the fact that it's problematic. The arguments aren't nearly as far-fetched as you and some other commenters suggest; for instance, he doesn't claim that disease arrived *before* the explorers, he suggests that it arrives with the early explorers and then spread much faster than the exploration, due to trade networks. Therefore, by the time explorers reached many areas, disease had already reached and impacted their societies. While, again, I find his overall numbers to be generally unsupportable, a lot of the specific examples are well-documented (for instance, it is known that the Pilgrims first settled in former settlements that were depopulated due to disease).

The other thing that seems to be misrepresented from this book (so far) is the general attitude. The way people are arguing about it here, I'd get the impression that Mann was saying that due to disease and whatnot, the white explorers, conquistadors, etc, did nothing wrong. There's no hint of that in the book; if anything, his focus on the potential size and extant of the societies that were destroyed makes the devastation seem much more huge than most descriptions or discussions. He does spend quite a lot of time (so far) actually discussing the culture, technology, politics, and history of the societies he focuses on.

One of the first points he makes is that Native American studies are usually taught in schools and thought of by most people like the societies were totally static -- They've been here since 15000 BC (or whenever; I understand the actual timeline is still debated in some circles), and they set up their societies a bit later, and then they didn't change. Honestly, doesn't that match what you learned in school growing up? I certainly never had a teacher *say* that, but when we studied Native American history, it was very static, very much a general "oh, here's what the Iroquois were like, and here's what the Aztec were like" and so on, until the Europeans got there, which was presented as the real start of history. He also notes that explanations of those events always seem to boil down to what the Europeans did or had and ignore the actions, advantages, or motivations of the Native Americans involved. Does that mean his explanations are perfect? That his own views are without ethnocentrism? Obviously not (nor, obviously, are mine, or anyone else's). But thus far I've read nothing that would indicate that he is suggesting that the collapse of native societies was okay or justifiable, or that the Europeans didn't do horrific things. Entirely the opposite.

On a largely separate note: Some megafauna were definitely hunted by humans; I'm most familiar with the American Mastodon. Some evidence exists that indicates that overhunting may have contributed to their eventual extinction. Moreover, just because animals lived during the Ice Age doesn't mean that they lived on ice (or even in a cold climate), so the loss of the glaciers doesn't automatically mean that, hey, their habitat is gone, so they're dead now. That does *not* mean that extinction of any or all of these animals was *caused* by the local human populations, that it was not primarily due to climate change (direct or indirect), or that any given species would not have gone eventually extinct without human involvement.

What it *really* doesn't mean, and I have a hard time imagining that people are arguing this^^, is that, even if mastodons went extinct entirely due to human overhunting 10,000 years ago, then that somehow indicates that Native Americans don't belong here. Or that it somehow justifies their societies being conquered or destroyed. Or that it had anything at all to do with the native societies present in the 15th to 17th centuries, or their descendants in the present day. I can't imagine how that argument could even be constructed with a straight face by anyone in this century who wasn't wearing a white sheet.

^^ By saying, "I have a hard time imagining that people are arguing this", I don't mean that I don't believe you that people *are* arguing this, just that I find it so off-the-wall to be generally unimaginable.

-- Amanda

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