EP 52 · 12:25

Disease and the collapse of Amazonian societies

From The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary)

Episode
6/23
Watch The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary)
Transcript

349 words · auto-generated from the episode video

12:25civilizations in the Amazon with kind of the techniques that we're going to go over. And it turns out what probably happened was European diseases like smallpox wiped out 90 to 95% of the indigenous population. And that can happen very, very quickly. I mean, we saw that with the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, imagine smallpox, which is a much more deadly disease and a much more transmissible disease, exposed to a population that has never seen anything like it, right? Um European and Eurasian populations, there's there's this famous um book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, that talks about why European populations and Eurasian populations, because of their proximity

13:07to domesticated animals, developed kind of a herd immunity to pathogens like smallpox. But, when you introduce that to a completely naive population in the Americas that has never been exposed to cows, domesticated cows, and things like that, now, all of a sudden, something like 90 to 95% of the population can be decimated. And then once I mean that that kind of number is where societies collapse. >> Right. >> Right? >> Yeah. >> What what what are you going to do with only 10% of your population remaining? >> Not evenly distri- not evenly distributed across the the roles necessary to sustain that society. >> so I mean whatever society you had

13:50you're you're back to the Stone Ages type of thing, right? And so whatever society remained the survivors went back deep into the jungle. And then perhaps that's why when you see all of the newer explorers come in 100 years after the 1500s, they don't see anyone. >> Mhm. >> They [clears throat] also don't see any remnants because the jungle is a beast, right? >> Most of these dwellings are made out of earth and mud and wood. These are things that are biodegradable and these are things that trees can grow on. >> Mhm. >> Right? Now the jungle takes over. You don't see anyone. You call fraud and you call them a liar,

14:30right? >> A fair given the information at the

From the episode
  1. EP 52

    The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary)

    For FFP’s first anniversary, we uncover the densely populated precolonial Amazon, imagine what our civilization will leave behind, and build the first shelves of the From First Principles library.

    The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year Anniversary)

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