[ExI] Death follows European contact (Mirco Romanato)

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark



 

>…all other things being equal I believe that killing 2 people is twice as bad as killing 1 and killing 4 is twice as bad as killing 2.   John K Clark 

 

 

I don’t know how else to count it besides numbers perished.

 

I have stayed out of this discussion, but the premise implied in the subject line vaguely implies that dead does not precede European contact.  We are accustomed to modern western cities where population is mostly stable for long periods.  We have occasional mass exodus from places like Detroit, but the people there didn’t actually die; most of them just moved elsewhere.  

 

I have a notion that mass death and mass exodus often precedes the coming of the Europeans, but isn’t well documented.  There are plenty of American legends about native tribes perishing in unison after the Europeans brought in diseases for which they had no natural immunity.  I have no doubt this occurred, but may be an incomplete picture.  I can imagine some of the tribes just packed up and left when the sick time came.  They might have blamed it on the mother earth for instance.  We can’t know for sure because of poor record keeping on the part of the natives.  In all that time the native Americans were on the continent, they had nothing analogous to the European and American decadal census, or if so, none of the records have survived.

 

spike





 

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