Viking and "old world" diseases in America

[wolfigor]

When Columbus first reached the "new world", himself and his crew did bring European diseases to the lands he visited.
It looks like that the diseases spread faster than explorers and colonists reaching every corner of new world much before the Europeans did.

However that was not the very first contact between Europeans and natives of the "new world", the Vikings reached there first.

Why the Vikings contacts with indigenous populations didn't trigger a pandemic like it happened after 1492?

The Viking settlement near L’Anse aux Meadows may have provided the necessary surface of contacts between locals and visitors to spread diseases.
Newfoundland and Labrador are fairly isolated but contacts and commerce between natives may have spread an initial contagion far beyond the initial contact point.

One may speculate how history may have changed if the Viking's contact in 1000AD would have spread a pandemic in the new world.
Follow-up European explorer 500 years later would have found a rebuilt local population of individuals now immune to old-world diseases.

 

[Cutlass]

The mass killing diseases were diseases of the cities. That is, they evolved and existed where there were many people in close proximity. They'd spread to the rural areas and to other towns and cities, but it's the cities that kept them going.

Cities that Norway and Iceland simply didn't have.

So when the Vikings reached Newfoundland, odds are high that none of the people who actually made the trip had ever been exposed to the diseases which later devastated the populations of native Americans. Small populations in small isolated villages with long winter isolations every year just isn't a good breeding ground for those diseases. Either the whole village dies, and then no one is left to spread it to the next village, or those that live didn't spread it because they were resistant. So after 100s of years of not all that much contact with the outside, the diseases have burned themselves out of these small and isolated populations.

 

[Agent327]

That would seem like a good argument. Except certain viruses can lie dormant for generations without doing any harm. It's more likely that a single Viking settlement in North America (which didn't survive) may simply not have been enough to expose the entire Indian population of the Americas to 'Old world' diseases. I agree with your lack of contact point though. In order for any disease to spread, there has to be extended contact with other populations - such as happened following Columbus' and Vespuccis discoveries.

 

[Domen]

In order for a disease (such as smallpox) to reach America from Europe, a sick person must get aboard a ship and survive the journey. The Viking exploration of America was too short, and carried out on a too small scale, for that to take place (simple probability calculus).

When Columbus first reached the "new world", himself and his crew did bring European diseases to the lands he visited.

Actually, not.

Columbus did not bring smallpox to the "New World". First epidemics of smallpox hit Hispaniola as late as December 1518, and Mexico in 1520. It took smallpox 25 years of colonization to get from Europe to Hispaniola, but just 1 - 2 years to get from there to Mexico.

Then it took smallpox around 4 to 8 more years to get to the Incan Empire (at some point between 1525 and 1527).

Smallpox reached America 25 years after the first Spanish settler did.

 

[wolfigor]

In order for a disease (such as smallpox) to reach America from Europe, a sick person must get aboard a ship and survive the journey. The Viking exploration of America was too short, and carried out on a too small scale, for that to take place (simple probability calculus).



Actually, not.

Columbus did not bring smallpox to the "New World". First epidemics of smallpox hit Hispaniola as late as December 1518, and Mexico in 1520. It took smallpox 25 years of colonization to get from Europe to Hispaniola, but just 1 - 2 years to get from there to Mexico.

Then it took smallpox around 4 to 8 more years to get to the Incan Empire (at some point between 1525 and 1527).

Smallpox reached America 25 years after the first Spanish settler did.

In some sources I read that the first (recorded) outbreak of smallpox in Hispaniola was in 1507, at the time of the 2nd Columbus' voyage.

However it's clear that the virus will take some time to reach mainland: Hispaniola is far from it and maritime commerce across the region may not have been very intense.
Spanish explorers may have reached mainland before the virus itself from Hispaniola (carried over commercial lines of the natives).

Once the virus hit mainland it did spread "quickly".
For example when Hernando de Soto travelled from Florida to Mexico (from 1539) he found the regions already depopulated.
The virus(es) in this case were faster than the explorers.

As a comparison, the black death of 14th century took several years to reach its farthest extension on the land.
It started in 1343 (Crimea) and 1346 (Constantinople) and only in 1353 it reached it's largest extension (1350 for Norway).

One could argue that Europe's international commercial network at the time was more tightly connected than what we had in the North America at the time of Columbus.


Anyway coming back to Vinland colony of 1000AD, the surface of contact between Vikings and natives was rather narrow.
Also the Vinland Vikings were coming from an isolated region (Greenland) and not from the motherland: so they represented themselves a smaller sample of population that may not have carried the viruses for which the natives had no immunity.

However it may have just taken one infected person travelling around settlements on the mainland to spread the disease: Smallpox's incubation period averages about 12 to 14 days but can range from 7 to 17 days.
During this time, people are not contagious but they are also asymptomatic, so they can travel around and be in a new place when they become sick and infective.

With large concentration of population and/or tightly interconnected networks this lead to faster and wider spread.
In the context of north west North America they may not have either of the two and they spared the continent from the pandemic... to make them still unprotected when the largest groups of Europeans arrived.

 

[Traitorfish]

That would seem like a good argument. Except certain viruses can lie dormant for generations without doing any harm. It's more likely that a single Viking settlement in North America (which didn't survive) may simply not have been enough to expose the entire Indian population of the Americas to 'Old world' diseases. I agree with your lack of contact point though. In order for any disease to spread, there has to be extended contact with other populations - such as happened following Columbus' and Vespuccis discoveries.

It's also worth remembering that the native populations around Newfoundland were comprised largely of small hunter-gatherer bands, so even if the Norse did spread some disease to them, it would probably burn out before it could spread to other groups, and certainly before it could spread to the densely populated regions further South. The Spanish did so much damage because they blundered into a bunch of dense, agrarian societies which allowed disease to spread quite rapidly before burning itself out.

Also worse considering that it was never any one disease that devastated Native societies after 1942, but a whole barrage of them. It's not even clear if Natives Americans were necessarily more susceptible to any given disease than an uninoculated European; the more immediate problem is that you have an entire society of uninoculated people getting hit by all these different diseases in rapid succession. This means that even survivors are badly weakened and food-production suffers, especially in areas which depended on maintenance-intensive irrigation, which means that survivors are even weaker and more vulnerable to disease, creates a whole grim cycle of disease and malnutrition that takes usually a century or so to work itself out before populations to recover. Throw in a bit of conquest, exploitation and genocide courtesy of the heroic Europeans, and that's where you start seeing 80%+ population loss in a couple of generations. Even if the Norse had caused an epidemic which reached the Mississippi or even Mexico, it wouldn't have had anything like the same effect as the post-1492 epidemics, because you're just not looking at the same intensity of disease or the same context of social and economic disruption.

So whatever the mechanics of getting an appropriate pathogen to the Americas in the first place, and I think Cutlass is right that it's a long shot, there's really nothing on the American side of things which would produce the same results as we see in the post-Columbian era.

 

[Flying Pig]

What precisely does inoculation consist of in 1500, other than being unlucky enough to catch a disease and lucky enough to survive? I think a point that's often underestimated is that European diseases didn't just kill millions of Americans - they killed Europeans by the million too. Even as late as 1665, a quarter of London were killed by the bubonic plague. About 8 million Germans died during the Thirty Years' War from the plague and typhus, and typhus killed 3 million Russians during their civil war. Simply being in a warlike environment wasn't particularly good for your health back then, whoever you were.

 

[Domen]

I think a point that's often underestimated is that European diseases didn't just kill millions of Americans - they killed Europeans by the million too. Even as late as 1665, a quarter of London were killed by the bubonic plague.

Indeed.

As late as the 1800s smallpox and tuberculosis were still among the main killers of European populations (in Warsaw in 1800-1805 over a dozen percent of all deaths each year were due to smallpox alone). But the diffference was that they were reaping their harvest year by year, systematically - instead of hitting in a massive outbreak of several diseases at once, as described by Traitorfish. Another difference was that in Europe those diseases were mostly killing children (even in the 1700s mortality in age group 0 - 5 was still as high as 35% - 50% throughout entire Europe), and adults to a lesser extent. Almost 30% of deaths of children under 12 in Britain in the 1880s were caused by tuberculosis (or at least in their postmortems it was noted that they had tuberculosis) - source.

About 8 million Germans died during the Thirty Years' War from the plague and typhus.

I'm quite sure that this figure is exaggerated, considering the overall population size of the affected areas and losses of Non-Germans.

In the context of north west North America they may not have either of the two and they spared the continent from the pandemic... to make them still unprotected when the largest groups of Europeans arrived.

Indeed. Had the Vikings infected both continents in the 1000s, Amerindians would have been much less vulnerable to Europeans in the 1500s.

Compare Africa with the Americas. Africans were not so vulnerable to diseases brought in by Europeans, and this is one of main reasons why they didn't get extinct even nearly to the same extent as Native Americans (especially in North America - as those in South America survived to a larger extent).

==================================

Population of mostly Amerindian (Native American) ancestry:
(percent of natives might be overestimated in case of Brazil)

Amerindians and mixed partially (+/- 50%) native people (Mestizos, Zambos):
(Paraguayans descent overwhelmingly from European males + native females)

By comparison here data on people of European origin (but % for the USA is exaggerated):

http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?149362-European-populations-worldwide&

And areas where native languages are still quite widely spoken (usually as minority languages):
(these languages are: Quechua, Guarani, Aymara, Nahuatl, Mayan and Mapuche)

 

[Cutlass]

What precisely does inoculation consist of in 1500, other than being unlucky enough to catch a disease and lucky enough to survive? I think a point that's often underestimated is that European diseases didn't just kill millions of Americans - they killed Europeans by the million too. Even as late as 1665, a quarter of London were killed by the bubonic plague. About 8 million Germans died during the Thirty Years' War from the plague and typhus, and typhus killed 3 million Russians during their civil war. Simply being in a warlike environment wasn't particularly good for your health back then, whoever you were.

To a large extent it's just the Darwinian principle. That is, the European population was the descendents of the survivors or earlier epidemics. So there's a chance that a larger portion of the population would be resistant to those diseases.

 

[Domen]

BTW - population size of what is now the USA and Canada in year 1500 AD is estimated in the article linked below as ca. 3,5 million people:

http://proceedings.caaconference.org/files/2000/35_Snow_CAA_2000.pdf

Even without the decline of native population, number of Europeans in the USA and Canada would have exceeded the natives already in the 1780s.

 

[Domen]

To a large extent it's just the Darwinian principle. That is, the European population was the descendents of the survivors or earlier epidemics.

One of the main problems with estimating the scale of depopulation in the Americas due to diseases, is that these estimates have to be based on other estimates - of initial (pre-Columbian) population size. And the latter vary greatly. Check "Appendix B" in the link below, by Angus Maddison:

http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/oriindex.htm

Here is the estimated ethnic structure of the population of Mexico in 1825 (by the end of Spanish rule):

- 70,000 peninsular Spaniards (from Iberia)
- 1,200,000 whites of Spanish extraction (but born in America)
- 1,900,000 mestizos (descended from Spanish-native Mexican unions)
- 3,700,000 native Mexican Amerindians
- 10,000 Sub-Saharan Africans

The total population was almost 6,9 million, including 3,7 million unmixed natives and 1,9 million mestizos (both together were over 80%).

As you can see unmixed native population in Mexico was still over 50% of the total in 1825. And unmixed Europeans were over 18%. The reduction of the percent of natives in censuses after 1825 is surely due to increasing number of mixed marriages (and maybe also due to immigration), but many people are simply more willing to identify as mestizos or whites than as natives, even if most of their ancestry is native and they have relatively few European ancestors.

This video, made by a Mexican and about Mexicans, seems to confirm that this is the case:


Link to video.

These people are so much rooted out of their native heritage that in U.S. population censuses they will call themselves "Black" or "White" (apart from Hispanic/Latino - which in the U.S. is not considered a race, but a cultural identity), and they almost never consider choosing the "Native American" option!

While the reality is that most of them indeed have a very significant percent of Native American (Native Mexican, I mean) ancestry.

 

[Traitorfish]

What precisely does inoculation consist of in 1500, other than being unlucky enough to catch a disease and lucky enough to survive?

Pretty much just that, but it makes a difference. A lot of the diseases that devastate Native American communities are basically childhood diseases, in Europe, so even if they're quite damaging, they don't spread as well and don't disrupt social and economic life in the same way. In Native American communities, all generations are getting hit at once, elders and experts are dying, fields are going fallow, it all gets very brutal.

To a large extent it's just the Darwinian principle. That is, the European population was the descendents of the survivors or earlier epidemics. So there's a chance that a larger portion of the population would be resistant to those diseases.

Well, it's debated how far that had an effect, though. It's certainly a factor, but the difference in natural resistance can be exaggerated. I mean, populations generally bottom out after a hundred to one hundred and fifty years and begin recovering from this point, which I don't think is enough time for a really strong genetic resistance to develop. At any rate, placing too much stress on genetics risks overlooking the more immediate historical causes of high morality-rates, like war, exploitation and social disruption.

 

[Domen]

placing too much stress on genetics risks overlooking the more immediate historical causes of high morality-rates, like war, exploitation and social disruption.

Exactly, Ludwik Krzywicki in his book (English) "Primitive society and its vital statistics" in chapter "Moral depression of dying-out peoples. Effects of this depression among hunting Tasmanians, nomad Chukchee and settled peoples of Melanesia" even described how societies which are socially disrupted by European colonization tend not only to have higher mortality-rates, but also much lower birth-rates than normally - which makes recovery even more difficult.

Check: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4381154;view=1up;seq=104

A lot of the diseases that devastate Native American communities are basically childhood diseases, in Europe, so even if they're quite damaging, they don't spread as well and don't disrupt social and economic life in the same way. In Native American communities, all generations are getting hit at once, elders and experts are dying, fields are going fallow, it all gets very brutal.

Indeed - all generations are getting hit at once, as the result of which there is noone left to care for the sick, to provide food, to bury the dead...

And without any medical care, without enough food supply, the survivors are weak, and more likely to die in the next outbreak, and so on.

In the meantime they are also exploited as forced labourers in mines and quarries by their colonial masters, they must pay high taxes, etc., etc.

Only a deadly combination of all those factors - not epidemics of Euro diseases alone - resulted in 80% or higher mortality ratios.

 

[Flying Pig]

Pretty much just that, but it makes a difference. A lot of the diseases that devastate Native American communities are basically childhood diseases, in Europe, so even if they're quite damaging, they don't spread as well and don't disrupt social and economic life in the same way. In Native American communities, all generations are getting hit at once, elders and experts are dying, fields are going fallow, it all gets very brutal.

Good point - in other words, although the numbers killed by the disease might not have been all that different, the damage that it did and consequently the number of people killed by associated causes would have been much greater.

 

[Domen]

Here is the so called Vinland map - it isn't certain whether it is a 20th century falsificate, or a Medieval original:

Viking exploration and settlement in North America was rather short, it probably lasted from 1000 AD to ca. 1025 AD.

But it is plausible that some of Viking settlers actually stayed in North America, and were absorbed by Native Americans.

Genetic evidence seems to suggest, that a good candidate for a Viking-admixed tribe are the Ojibwe (Chippewa).

The Chippewa have a pattern of European-like Y-DNA that is hard to explain by post-Columbian admixture. It fits better to a pre-Columbian founder effect, but it rather can't be too ancient (not from prehistoric migrations). So some Vikings seem to be better candidates for the origin of that admixture.

 

[Agent327]

Here is the so called Vinland map - it isn't certain whether it is a 20th century falsificate, or a Medieval original:

Not clear? It can only be not clear lacking proper investigation.

 

[Domen]

Some falsificates are hard to distinguish from originals. In Medieval books there are sometimes empty pages - you can use such an empty page to draw a map on it, you also need to use ink that has the same chemical composition as Medieval ink - and such forgeries are hard to detect.

C14 dating shows that parchment used to draw the Vinland map is from around year 1434. So it may be authentic.

 

[Agent327]

There are empty pages on most every book, be it medieval or modern. The crux would not be if the paper (or parchment, which was the commonly used item) was medieval, but the material (ink) used to draw the map. A (forgery or genuine) expert could easily get the paper (parchment), but simulating 500 year old ink is a bit trickier.

Seeing as the parchment is not older than 1423, this places the map some 400 years after the discovery of 'Vinland' by Vikings (but still before Columbus, obviously).

At any rate, it's not clear whether it is of medieval origin, because of modern trace remains found on/in the map. But, irrespective of the yay or nay antiquity of the map, it's certain that Vikings did visit a small part of North America, as you pointed out.