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between the first europeans arrivingin 1492 and the victorian age, the indigenous population of the new world dropped by atleast 90%. the cause? not the conquistadors and company -- they killedlots of people but their death count is nothing compared to what they brought with them: smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, mumps, measles and more leaptfrom those first explorers to the costal tribes, then onward the microscopic invaders spreadthrough a hemisphere of people with no defenses against them. tens of millions died. these germs decided the fate of these battleslong before the fighting started.
now ask yourself: why didn't the europeans getsick? if new-worlders were vulnerable to old-worlddiseases, then surely old-worlders would be vulnerable to new world diseases. yet, there was no americapox spreading eastwardinfecting europe and cutting the population from 90 million to 9. had americapox existedit would have rather dampened european ability for transatlantic expansion. to answer why this didn't happen: we needfirst to distinguish regular diseases -- like the common cold -- from what we'll call plagues. 1. spread quickly between people.
sneezes spread plagues faster than handshakeswhich are faster than closeness. plagues use more of this than this. 2. they kill you quickly or you become immune. catch a plague and you're dead within sevento thirty days; survive and you'll never get it again. your body has learned to fight it.you might still carry it -- the plague lives in you, you can still spread it -- but it can'thurt you. the surface answer to this question isn'tthat europeans had better immune systems to fight off new world plagues -- it's that the newworld didn't have plagues for them to catch. they had regular diseases but there was noamericapox to carry.
these are history's biggest killers, and theyall come from the old world. but why? let's dig deeper, and talk cholera: a plaguethat spreads if your civilization does a bad job of separating drinking water from poopingwater. london was terrible at this, making it the cholera capital of the world. choleracan rip through dense neighborhoods, killing swaths of the population before moving onward.but that's the key: it has to move on. in a small, isolated group, a plague likecholera cannot survive -- it kills all available victims, leaving only the immune and thentheres nowhere to go -- it's a fire that burns through its fuel.
but a city -- shining city on the hill -- towhich rural migrants flock, where hundreds of babies are born a day: this is sanctuaryfor the fire of plague; fresh kindling comes to it. the plague flares and smolders andflares and smolders again -- impossible to extinguish. historically, in city borders, plagues killedfaster than people could breed. cities grew because more people moved to them than diedinside of them. cities only started growing from their own population in the 1900s whenmedicine finally left its leaches and bloodletting phase and entered its soap and soup phase, giving humans some tools to slow death. but before that a city was an unintentionalplayground for plagues and a grim machine to
sort the immune from the rest. so the deeper answer is that the new worlddidn't have plagues because the new world didn't have big, dense, terribly sanitizeddeeply interconnected cities for plagues to thrive. ok, but the new world wasn't completely barrenof cities, and tribes weren't completely isolated. otherwise the newly-arrived smallpox in the1400s couldn't have spread. cities are only part of the puzzle: they'rerequired for plagues, but cities don't make the germs that start the plagues -- thosegerms come from the missing piece. now, most germs don't want to kill you, forthe same reason you don't want to burn down
your house; germs live in you. chronic diseaseslike leprosy are terrible because they're very good at living in you and not killing you. plague lethality is an accident, a misunderstanding,because the germs that cause them don't know they're in humans; they thinkthey're in this. plagues come from animals. whooping cough comes from pigs, as does flu,as well as from birds. our friend the cow alone is responsible for measles, tuberculosis,and smallpox. for the cow these diseases are no big deal-- like colds for us. but when cow germs get in humans, the things they do to make acow a little sick to spread make humans very sick.
deadly sick. now, germs jumping species like this is extraordinarilyrare. that's why generations of humans can spend time around animals just fine. beingthe patient zero of a new animal-to-human plague is winning a terrible lottery. but a colonial-age city raises the odds: thereused to be animals everywhere; horses, herds of livestock in the streets, open slaughterhouses,meat markets pre-refrigeration, and rivers of human and animal excrement runningthrough it all. a more perfect environment for diseases tojump species could hardly be imagined. so the deeper answer is that plagues comefrom animals, but so rarely that you have to raise
the odds with many chances for infectionand even then the new-born plague needs a fertile environment to grow. the old world had the necessary piecesin abundance. but why was a city like london filled withsheep and pigs and cows and tenochtitlan wasn't? this brings us to the final level, for thisvideo anyway. some animals can be put to human use -- thisis what domestication means: animals you can breed, not just hunt. forget for a the moment the modern world: go backto 10,000bc when tribes of humans reached just about everywhere. if you were in oneof these tribes, what local animals could you capture, alive, and successfully pen to breed?
maybe you're in north dakota and thinkingabout catching a buffalo: an unpredictable, violent tank on hooves, that can outrun youacross the planes, leap over your head and travels in herds thousands strong. oh, and you have no horses to help you -- becausethere are no horses on the continent. horses live here -- and won't be brought over untiltoo late. it's just you, a couple buddies, and stone-basedtools. american indians didn't fail to domesticate buffalo because they couldn't figure it out.they failed because it's a buffalo. no one could do it -- buffalo would have been amazingcreatures to put to human work back in bc, but it's not going to happen -- humans haveonly barely domesticated buffalo with all
our modern tools. the new world didn't have good animal candidatesfor domestication. almost everything big enough to be useful is also too dangerous,or too agile. meanwhile the fertile crescent to centraleurope had cows and pigs and sheep and goats: easy-peasy animals comparatively beggingto be domesticated. a wild boar is something to contend with ifyou only have stone tools but it's possible to catch and pen and breed and feed to eat-- because pigs can't leap to the sky or crush all resistance beneath their hooves. in the new world the only native domesticationcontestant was: llamas. they're better than
nothing -- which is probably why the biggestcities existed in south america -- but they're no cow. ever try to manage a heard of llamasin the mountains of peru? yeah, you can do it, but it's not fun. nothing but drama, thesellamas. these might seem, cherry-picked examples,because aren't there hundreds of thousands of species of animals? yes, but when you'restuck at the bottom of the tech tree, almost none of them can be domesticated. from thedawn of man until this fateful meeting, humans domesticated; maybe a baker's dozen of uniquespecies the world over. and even to get that high a number you need to stretch it to includehoneybees and silkworms; nice to have, but you can't build a civilization on a foundationof honey alone.
these early tribes weren't smarter, or betterat domestication. the old world had more valuable and easy animals. with dogs, herding sheepand cattle is easier. now humans have a buddy to keep an eye on the clothing factory, andthe milk and cheeseburger machine, and the plow-puller. now farming is easier, whichmeans there's more benefit to staying put, which means more domestication, which meansmore food which means more people and more density and oh look where we're going. citiesville:population: lots; bring your animals; plagues welcome. that is the full answer: the lack of new worldanimals to domesticate limited not only exposure to germs sources but also limited food production,which limited population growth, which limited
cities, which made plagues in the new worldan almost impossibility. in the old [world], exactly the reverse, and thus a continent full ofplague and a continent devoid of it. so when ships landed in the new world, therewas no americapox to bring back. the game of civilization has nothing to dowith the players, and everything to do with the map. access to domesticated animals innumbers and diversity is the key resource to bootstrapping a complex society from nothing-- and that complexity brings with it, unintentionally, a passive biological weaponry devastatingto outsiders. start the game again but move the domesticableanimals across the sea and history's arrow of disease and death flows in the oppositedirection.
this still does leave one last question. justwhy are some animals domesticable and others not? why couldn't american indians domesticatedeer? why can't zebras be domesticated? they look just like horses. and what does it meanto tame an animal? to answer that, click here for part 2. this video has been brought to you by audible.comand was a presentation of diamond's theory as laid out in his book gun, germs and steel.if you found this video interesting you should go right now to audible.com/grey and get acopy of the book. there is so much more in this than could ever been explained in a shortvideo -- guns, germs and steel is the history book to rule all history books.
audible has over 180,000 things for you tolisten to. it is an endless source of interestingness. so once again, please to go audible.com/grey get a 30-day free trial and let them knowthat you came from this channel. audiobooks are a big part of my life and ithink they should be a big part of your life. why not get started today?
