mckenna193 wrote: > But the first nations of the americas might have conquered the Euros if the > diseases had gone the other way, as McNeil pointed out in Plagues and > Peoples. In other words, what if the Aztecs had virulent strains of disease > from domesticated animals for which "Fancy Bad Man" Cortez and his troops were not immune?<
yes, my parenthetical remark was overly simple. By the way, I believe Diamond's GGS theory is based partly on McNeil (but I haven't read the latter's book). With desperate brevity, the GGS theory is that the largely unified geographical land-mass of Eurasia (including North Africa) was a gigantic cauldron in which all sorts of ethnic groups and tribes competed. The ones that came to the top (circa 1492) were the ones that at least temporarily were immune to more diseases (because earlier generations had encountered so many of them), had the most advanced weaponry (because they had had to fight so many wars), and the most solid organizational forms (ditto).This made them more likely to prevail when they invaded what they thought at first was India. In other words, the western Europeans (the inhabitants of the northwestern part of Eurasia-plus-North-Africa) were lucky. -- Jim Devine / "If heart-aches were commercials, we'd all be on TV." -- John Prine _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
