The thing was that _any_ outside contact was going to be doom for North America. A lack of resistance and no sanitation equaled a tinder box just waiting for the right plague.
Precolombian north america actually had really sophisticated sanitation. In urban areas they pretty advanced waste management. In other areas, a lot of their seasonal mobility was possibly driven by sanitation needs. And they have really in depth practices around the ways they treat waterways and waste placement.
The problem was actually the exact opposite. Compared to Europeans, they were obsessive about soap and cleanliness. But Europeans lived in really dense villages alongside their livestock for many generations and they suffered greatly from it. The history of Europe is basically one outbreak after another. But ofc over time some amount of immunities developed
Maybe if North Americans had less sanitation and kept livestock they would've developed their own deadly diseases too that would've killed Europeans.
This is commonly repeated, but if you go look at actual record keeping - at the history of early North American and Caribbean/Bahamas colonization through the period where there stopped being as much cross-cultural contact - we see epidemic after epidemic wipe our colonials as much as any. The mortality rate is staggering - even places that should have shown this the most - Haiti for example, the documented evidence was far closer to 100% mortality to Europeans, and significantly less for indigenous. Coming to Haiti during the Haitian revolution was a death sentence for all of the people who lived in squalor in one of the densest cities in Europe - Paris.
Cultures coming together historically were deadly. There is a school of thought that argues that the Persian and Roman downfall was directly associated with the ability of diseases to transit roads.
Of course, this is the stuff that we have records for. It's possible that there was a undocumented mass extinction event, But I tend to be skeptical of historical claims that are based on extremely localized and limited archeological projections.
Well regardless, we know North American natives had extensive sanitation practices and epidemics were quite rare. Syphilis, tuberculosis, intestinal parasites, and Chagas disease were all present but rarely turned into mass outbreaks.
Mass graves are almost completely absent and life tables show steady and predictable mortality curves over centuries
I find it hard to believe that Europeans living in close quarters with livestock didn't result in increased rates of epidemics tbh but I'll take your word for it
I didn;t say that it didn't - in fact, the reality was mass casulty events where common in a way that is unthinkable. We do _ in fact_ have plenty of mass graves for colonists. The lack of evidence of the same on the American Indian side makes me skeptical of the whole narrative.
i think it's quite likely that the casualties where in similar scope across two different civilizations, but that the colonialists advantage (if you can call it such) of excess population and higher density of settlers, meant that the colonialists simply outlasted a far smaller population group.
You’re doing a lot of heavy lifting with this word colonist. The mass graves are either “imported criminal” (being in debt was a crime) or slave populations.
And it was much more about the horrid working conditions that these forced laborers were forced to work under.
Well if your only definition of sanitation is urban ones, then they had that as well as I pointed out. I think the fact that they had sanitation practices in both urban and rural areas is quite remarkable. Clearly you don't and felt the need to share that opinion. Thanks.
Please reread the comment you just responded to. I said it was remarkable (as in, worthy to be remarked) that these practices happened both in urban and non-urban cultures.
The North American cities were certainly more advanced in terms of sanitation than anything in Europe at the time. You had stuff like dual aquaducts differentiating drinking water from washing water and public cleaning crews and urban waste maangement and people bathed daily. While London was throwing its shit in the streets, the Aztecs were building public toilets
My wife informed me that I always comment on the hardness of the floor, regardless of where we are. (I will take off my footwear to stand on novel surfaces with my bare feet. Situationally, ofc.)
Like the other commenter said, you've got your various hard/soft combinations (there's definitely hard/soft carpeting, for instance). Synthetics and rubber are all over the place.
Outdoors: a wet field is definitely different than a soft field and a frozen field is different from a hard pack. You've also got your various snow amounts.
"Mushy" is almost universally bad, from wetlands to wood to computer lab removable flooring.
Good things I have found to stand on are large natural rocks, fine-grained beaches, and deeply carpeted bedrooms.
Marble, tile, hardwood, softwood(?), vinyl, stone, smooth concrete, textured concrete, short carpet, long carpet, grass, turf, sand, asphalt, gravel, hay, moss, plastic, foam, rubber. Plus the combination of different subfloors.
Is the guilty pleasure here one that you feel the satisfaction/enjoyment/reward is one that your younger self would disdain?
It's okay to evolve your thinking on this. Some of my younger ideas were conclusively proven wrong, payed for by the consequences of my actions and all that. Younger me clearly got a few things wrong, I feel like I need to re-examine my preconceptions often.
Young Me, a voracious reader, was defeated several times by the LOTR books. To this day, I doubt I could force myself to read dozens of pages of Tom Bombadil singing about trees.
Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.
If you count by threes, the ones place is unique until you pass each multiple of 30 - 3, 6, 9, _8, _1, _4, where was I? I hadn’t made it to 30, ends with a 4, must be 24. 27, 30, 33, _6…
Serves as a sort of checksum, as long as you know roughly how many you have and just the last digit.
