The "Great Dying" may have caused the "Little Ice Age"

Ygorcs said:
Africans didn't because they had many instances of contact with Eurasians (and actually even direct colonization) since the Paleolithic (if North Africa is considered, but surely some contact with Subsaharan Africa happened, especially during the Green Sahara period) and until the early modern era. Africans also had had contact with many animal domesticates. East Africa had regular contact with Arabs, Persians, even Indians, and Austronesians settled Madagascar and also had some contact with the coast. Most diseases from Eurasia had surely reached many if not even most parts of Africa by the time Europeans arrived in larger numbers.

As for Australian Aboriginals, they did have massive death tolls due to Eurasian diseases. Their death toll is also estimated at roughly 80-90% of the total as in the Americas AFAIK.

I think it is quite likely that the Americas had at least 50 to 60 million people. Brazil's population alone was estimated at roughly 3 to 5 million (I think 4 million is fair enough). It may look like a lot of people, but the Americas are second only to Eurasia in terms of total area. 60 million people would be 1.4 inhabitant per sq. kilometer on average. Not a very unlikely density for a continent inhabited mostly by farmers with some very productive crops and quite efficient agriculture in their most populated areas (Mesoamerica and Andes) even for late medieval standards. The estimated world population in 1500 was around 450 million people for 135 million sq. km. of land (all land minus Antarctica), therefore the average world density was around 3.3, more than double the rate of the Americas. The population must've been much more concentrated in the eastern strip from Central Mexico to the Bolivian highlands.

Btw, the map is clearly about the early expansion of civilization and agriculture in the Americas, not how it was in 1492 when Columbus arrived. It must portray the Americas some 2000-2500 years fore.
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The map says 1000 BCE, but looking at the fact that it citing Olmecs, you are probably right.
 
bicicleur said:
In Australia, we know about the Torres Islanders who had contacts with rice farmers and were trading with both the Papuans and the Aboriginees.
There was the spread of a new language over large parts of Australia, and there was the spread of the dog, the Dingo.
It seems there were contacts with people from southern Celebes.

For America, the first contacts were in the Caraïbean and in south and central America.
How did the diseases spread to North America.
When the French and the British settled on the eastcoast, where the Natives allready immune?
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As for Australia, I'm not sure how much contact they in Australia proper had with the Asians (directly probably none, but indirectly via the Papuans and Torres Islanders, okay). I'll just assume that they didn't have that frequent a contact with people who already (or still) carried the viruses and bacteria of the Old World, otherwise the documented high death tolls due to European diseases probably wouldn't have been as dramatic if they had been exposed gradually and multiple times to the Eurasian diseases. Maybe the contacts were not frequent enough, the land was not populated enough, the settlements not integrated enough etc. to allow for an earlier and widespread dissemination of the main viruses and bacteria and therefore the acquisition of immunity by the aboriginals. The fact is that the post-coloniai population seems to have dwindled way too fast for it to have been just because of displacement and genocidal slaughters by the white settlers (IMHO).

Apparently they weren't. Even in the 19th century when the West was invaded and settled much more decisively by the non-natives many tribes seem to have suffered massive death tolls. In the 20th century the settlement of previously uncontacted parts of the Amazon led to many Amerindian tribes dying like flies because of Old World diseases (or maybe new strains of diseases to which they had been exposed only centuries earlier). I believe the epidemics often died out on their own in the Americas because they killed most of the hosts too rapidly (such epidemics tend to self-contain), the population density became increasingly lower with more sparse settlements (therefore making the dispersal of, diseases neere a certain concentration of people with the disease to really become a true epidemics), and the American societies were not that interconnected to begin with. Hence, the diseases did not spread as fast and easily as some people think, in many places they arrived even before the Europeans came in, but in others it's possible that they were not exposed to all of the diseases brought by them until much later. The Americas seem to have been highly structured genetically and linguistically, so I doubt the contacts with very far and wide populations were intensive enough to cause a uniform spread of the pandemics throughout the continent at roughly the same time.
 
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