Name: アメリカポックス消えたペスト (Americapox: The Missing Plague)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T10:20:49.000Z
Duration: 11 min 12 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Between the first Europeans arriving in 1492 and the Victorian age, the indigenous

population of the New World dropped by at least 90%.

Not the conquistadors and company -- they killed lots of people but their death count is nothing

compared to what they brought with them: small pox, typhus, tuberculosis, influenza, bubonic

plague, cholera, mumps, measles and more leapt from those first explorers to the costal tribes,

then onward the microscopic invaders spread through a hemisphere of people with no defenses

These germs decided the fate of these battles long before the fighting started.

Now ask yourself: why didn't the Europeans get sick?

If New-Worlders were vulnerable to old-world diseases, then surely Old-Worlders would be

Yet, there was no Americapox spreading eastward infecting Europe and cutting the population

from 90 million to 9. Had Americapox existed it would have rather dampened European ability

To answer why this didn't happen: we need first to distinguish regular diseases -- like

the common cold -- from what we'll call plagues.

Sneezes spread plagues faster than handshakes which are faster than closeness. Plagues

2. They kill you quickly or you become immune.

Catch a plague and you're dead within seven to 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't hurt you.

The surface answer to this question isn't that Europeans had better immune systems to

fight off New World plagues -- it's that the New World didn't have plagues for them to catch.

They had regular diseases but there was no Americapox to carry.

These are history's biggest killers, and they all come from the Old World.

Let's dig deeper, and talk cholera: a plague that spreads if your civilization does a bad

job of separating drinking water from pooping water. London was terrible at this, making

it the cholera capital of the world. Cholera can 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 like cholera cannot survive -- it kills all available

victims, leaving only the immune and then theres nowhere to go -- it's a fire that burns

But a city -- shining city on the hill -- to which rural migrants flock, where hundreds

of babies are born a day: this is sanctuary for the fire of plague; fresh kindling comes

to it. The plague flares and smolders and flares and smolders again -- impossible to

Historically, in city borders, plagues killed faster than people could breed. Cities grew

because more people moved to them than died inside of them. Cities only started growing

from their own population in the 1900s when medicine 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 unintentional playground for plagues and a grim machine to

So the deeper answer is that the New World didn't have plagues because the New World

didn't have big, dense, terribly sanitized deeply interconnected cities for plagues to

OK, but The New World wasn't completely barren of cities, and tribes weren't completely isolated.

Otherwise the newly-arrived smallpox in the 1400s couldn't have spread.

Cities are only part of the puzzle: they're required for plagues, but cities don't make

the germs that start the plagues -- those germs come from the missing piece.

Now, most germs don't want to kill you, for the same reason you don't want to burn down

your house; germs live in you. Chronic diseases like 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 think they're in this.

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 a cow a little sick to spread make humans very sick.

Now, germs jumping species like this is extraordinarily rare. That's why generations of humans can

spend time around animals just fine. Being the patient zero of a new animal-to-human

But a colonial-age city raises the odds: there used to be animals everywhere; horses, herds

of livestock in the streets, open slaughterhouses, meat markets pre-refrigeration, and rivers

of human and animal excrement running through it all.

A more perfect environment for diseases to jump species could hardly be imagined.

So the deeper answer is that plagues come from animals, but so rarely that you have to raise

the odds with many chances for infection and even then the new-born plague needs a fertile environment

to grow. The Old World had the necessary pieces in abundance.

But why was a city like London filled with sheep and pigs and cows and Tenochtitlan wasn't?

This brings us to the final level, for this video anyway.

Some animals can be put to human use -- this is what domestication means: animals you can

Forget for a the moment the modern world: go back to 10,000BC when tribes of humans reached

just about everywhere. If you were in one of these tribes, what local animals could you

capture, alive, and successfully pen to breed?

Maybe you're in North Dakota and thinking about catching a Buffalo: an unpredictable,

violent tank on hooves, that can outrun you across the planes, leap over your head and

Oh, and you have no horses to help you -- because there are no horses on the continent. Horses

live here -- and won't be brought over until too late.

It's just you, a couple buddies, and stone-based tools. 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 amazing creatures to put to human work back in BC,

but it's not going to happen -- humans have only barely domesticated buffalo with all

The New World didn't have good animal candidates for domestication. Almost everything big enough

to be useful is also too dangerous, or too agile.

Meanwhile the fertile crescent to central Europe had cows and pigs and sheep and

goats: easy-peasy animals comparatively begging to be domesticated.

A wild boar is something to contend with if you 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

In the New World the only native domestication contestant was: llamas. They're better than

nothing -- which is probably why the biggest cities existed in South America -- but they're

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アメリカポックス消えたペスト (Americapox: The Missing Plague)

vulnerable

chronic

immune

devastating