Slashdot Mirror
Salmonella Probably Killed the Aztecs (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In 1545 disaster struck Mexico's Aztec nation when people started coming down with high fevers, headaches and bleeding from the eyes, mouth and nose. Death generally followed in three or four days. Within five years as many as 15 million people -- an estimated 80% of the population -- were wiped out in an epidemic the locals named "cocoliztli." The word means pestilence in the Aztec Nahuatl language. Its cause, however, has been questioned for nearly 500 years. On Monday scientists swept aside smallpox, measles, mumps, and influenza as likely suspects, identifying a typhoid-like "enteric fever" for which they found DNA evidence on the teeth of long-dead victims.
Scientists now say they have probably unmasked the culprit. Analysing DNA extracted from 29 skeletons buried in a cocoliztli cemetery, they found traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium, of the Paratyphi C variety. It is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. The Mexican subtype rarely causes human infection today. Many salmonella strains spread via infected food or water, and may have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animals brought by the Spanish, the research team said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Scientists now say they have probably unmasked the culprit. Analysing DNA extracted from 29 skeletons buried in a cocoliztli cemetery, they found traces of the salmonella enterica bacterium, of the Paratyphi C variety. It is known to cause enteric fever, of which typhoid is an example. The Mexican subtype rarely causes human infection today. Many salmonella strains spread via infected food or water, and may have travelled to Mexico with domesticated animals brought by the Spanish, the research team said. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
I really do wonder, though... would the Old World folks have acted any differently if they'd understood that going to the New World would pretty much obliterate the locals through disease?
My feeling is that it would be unlikely to change their policy, at least by those in power.
Many people tended to view subjugation or even extermination of "lesser" peoples as their divine right. That attitude is pervasive even in relatively modern times, as with WW2-era Nazis or Japanese and their attitudes about races they viewed as inferior to their own. And I shouldn't give the Allied powers a pass either, such as with the British subjugation of India and the middle east, or the French and Dutch colonies in the Far East. And I believe there is historical evidence the US army deliberately used germ warfare against Native Americans in one case. Sadly, empathy for tribes outside of one's own has not historically been one of humanity's bright points.
In fairness, contact between long separated peoples was basically inevitable once global exploration and trade became a thing. There's really no way to effectively quarantine a large population like that, at least in the long term. A single shipwrecked sailor is probably all it takes to trigger an epidemic.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.