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Ishmael wrote: | I started down this road when I began to question the received wisdom regarding the fate of American Indians, supposedly killed off in a holocaust of disease brought to the Americas by Columbus and Co. I've just got it in my head that this probably didn't happen at all -- |
What killed a large part of the native populations of the new world, after contact was made by Europeans....?
Answer...... it was germs....
That would be European germs?
Answer..... correct
So the native populations were largely germ free....?
Answer.... Err no but they could not resist the new European germs.
So the Europeans did not pick up any germs from the natives...?
Err well I guess they must have had some resistance....what you are overlooking is that the Europeans were living in towns and cities with domestic animals,where there were germs, and they had developed a resistance.
So you are saying that the natives did not have towns/cities....
Err well modern archaeology shows that they did have towns/cities of many thousands of people which were overcrowded and contained domestic animals...
So in essence what we have is historical reports of natives dying from a disease that might have been smallpox ..... and the Europeans were to blame?
Yep it is obvious. It was smallpox.
Thank you
No thank you.
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N8 has wasted a couple of days looking for evidence that smallpox wiped out large numbers of Aztecs and Incas. (it didn't)
The explanation for all these deaths is both simple and obvious, they were all killed by.........
a variant of Spanish Flu.........
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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nemesis8 wrote: | ...a variant of Spanish Flu......... |
But we've already suggested that Spanish Flu wasn't the flu -- but treatment for the flu.
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Ishmael wrote: | But we've already suggested that Spanish Flu wasn't the flu -- |
Yep and it had nothing to do with Spain....
N8 is convinced, there is a clear pattern.
Incas = Spanish flu
Aztecs= Spanish flu
North American Natives= Spanish flu
1918=Spanish flu
Mexico 2009=Spanish flu
The Spanish link is clear.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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What are you getting at?
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Hey Ish, we are not alone, there are some more conquistadors that reckon the smallpox wipeout theory is bollocks. Take the slideshow option. Thought provoking.
http://www.hist.umn.edu/~rmccaa/aha2004/
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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No pockmarked mummies have ever been found in Peru.
Devastating.
So why don't the authors question the demographic collapse itself? I say the native population was never very high to begin with.
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How many people live in the United States?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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400 million, at my last count.
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Yep dead right. I guess you're smarter than me, you knew the answer. The way I did it was to look at the last census, (which are always correct) and projected forward using birth and mortality rates etc.
That's the reverse of the method you use to calculate the Inca, you look at the "census" after colonisation and calculate backwards. That way we know scientifically, it was either 2 or 37 million, or somewhere in between..... all according to the modelling used.
This method is even more precise than carbon dating
Sorry Ish, your thesis about the low native population is in tatters.
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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MPI
Or have you ruled that out?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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nemesis8 wrote: | This method is even more precise than carbon dating. |
What are you talking about?
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Sorry Ish....we Brits don't target our irony...we just slap it on....N8 is by far the worst offender.... I can't help myself...
What I was trying to show was... that despite the scientific modelling claims nobody really knows the Inca population pre conquest. It's really guesswork..... so the bigger the "wipeout" the higher the population....
So you could be right, there could have been far fewer natives...I just see no way of proving it.......maybe some bright spark could look at the total archaeology and take a punt? Would that be feasible?
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Just throw this in re mortality rates. It is well known that modern Aborigines have a much shorter life expectancy than non Aboriginal Australians.
http://www.aihw.gov.au/indigenous/health/mortality.cfm
The figures are really quite dramatic
"For the period 1996-2001, the life expectancy at birth for an Indigenous male was 59 years, and for an Indigenous female, 65 years. For the period 2002-2004, males in the total Australian population had a life expectancy of 78 years and females 83 years."
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So we don't know what the Inca population was before conquest and we don't know what were the mortality rates before conquest.....
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