Last night at the Charles Mann talk, he compared two pictures. One was of an old world barn, where a family lived with its animals. Close, daily proximity with sheep, goats, hogs, cattle, poultry. Then he shows a lodge from the east coast of the U.S., pre-contact. It's filled with skins. Old world people lived in a bath of cross-species microorganisms for thousands of years, giving them a huge edge in disease resistance. It wasn't just small pox and the flu. I hadn't realized malaria arrives in Americas in Columbian exchange.

/thread

Diamond's book is exactly on point to the question in the OP.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

A good book imo. It opened my eyes to a lot of the misconceptions I had about a lot of things. One thing he does bring up is that the ecosystem in the Americas was very different from Europe. As such Native Americans had a very acute understanding of agriculture and how to exploit nature in the American ecosystem given what they had, but the Europeans didn't comprehend the new ecology so they applied their understanding of the Old World to the New World. Fenced in plots with large farmland was a signal of civilization in Europe but was impractical and difficult in the Americas with the food crops that they had. The book goes into detail how more times than not, European pretentiousness of what 'civilized' was worked against them time and time again while the Native Americas, in contrast, were very skilled and very productive but were felled by European diseases and European indirect interventions in the environment more so than direct martial conflict.

This just has to be said. Knowing the nature and capability of the Europeans at the time (I have studied a ton of history) I just don't see this outcome of Europeans settling going in any other direction. Sure if European diseases had not affected them as you put it "European indirect interventions" as well as ability to beat a less skilled opponent in war would have still been game over.

It was a question of how and when not if. Sure you can find some random event that changes history, played out a certain way, but in 1000 trials the Native American would certainly lose 98% of the time. Something more probable is something like the US never declares it Independence from Britain in 1776 because it is in a much deeper struggle with the Native American's, but the Native American's would still not win the day.

I know we are in a politically correct era of history, but the Native American's did not have the military capability to keep the Europeans from pushing them out of there lands and conquering them. That does not mean it was moral by our standards, but that does not change the reality of the struggle.

Native American's, like many other people, had a great culture and you can admire the life style, but they lacked the military capability to not be conquered.

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Winston Churchill

I can't imagine a benevolent alien species having the technological capabilities to find us and somehow not having a solution to the disease problem.

I will have to disagree. Just because you figure out how to travel long distances in space means you have a full understand the biology of a completely unknown species.

I actually could see a possibility of the same type of thing happening like happened to the Native American's.

Look at the The 1918 flu pandemic (the "Spanish flu") Between 50 and 100 million died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Even using the lower estimate of 50 million people, 3% of the world's population (which was 1.86 billion at the time died of the disease. Some 500 million, or 27%, were infected.

This was not that long ago. We are far more a risk with this type of encounter than we may want to admit.

They won't need a full understanding of unknown biology. A space faring benevolent species that travels around the universe looking for life to help out will certainly know of the risk of disease and find a way to communicate with an unknown species in a manner that minimizes this risk.

"A space faring benevolent species that travels around the universe looking for life to help out"
-------
A good look at history shows that there is only one "benevolent species" worried about of survival of other species.

Man has made some efforts in this area with conservation, but we have also proven to be the planets most dangerous and destructive animal.

I sense a level here and we are going off track but you have to consider we may not be alone in the universe. An encounter may not be the "happily ever after" for all involved. It may be something that is totally unexpected that usually creates the most issues.

what is the bar of accomplishment for a society? is it existing? in that case score one point for western society (as the sioux civilization no longer exists). is it population size? in that case western society is the clear winner over indigenous peoples (with Asian societies currently in the lead, ldo). is it development of technology that shapes/changes/becomes essential to the human experience? in that case, another win for western society.

I can understand your obvious admiration for native americans and the things they accomplished, but let's try to refrain from handicapping or tilting the playing field in order to make indigenous peoples seem more important to the course of history and the modern age than they were.

The bolded is not entirely accurate. Andrew Jackson's brutal campaign against the Creek people of the Southeast U.S. was precipitated by a Creek attack on an american settlement fort in which the natives slaughtered hundreds of civilians (almost exclusively women and young children) while the soldiers were away. This resulted in the virtual destruction of the Creek people by a combined force of Cherokee and Jackson's militia.

OP hoped for an answer that would go like "cuz they're not white'

source I don't think this attack was a precipitation in any way. The Creek War, or Creek Civil War, section on wikipedia is pretty good. The attacks from white settlers and their government were just gonna happen regardless of all of this imo.

Hear me, people: We have now to deal with another race, small and feeble when are fathers first met them, but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possessions is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.-- Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877.

higher average temparature leads to lower average IQ. that is a fact.
scandinavians are the smartest on average and hotter areas have lower IQ's.

anyway, i think the life of an old-school native-american was more enjoyable than life in a more "sophisticated" modern way, since they, for example, live in peace with nature.

The above is a trollish statement. The Aztecs and Mayans were located in warmer regions than the Nords -- as were the Greeks and Egyptians. Their civilizations were more developed than the Nordic tribes.

No it's not. It's not anything like a "fact," and has no historical validity behind it. If Scandinavians have always had a higher IQ than other peoples, why did Scandinavia lag so far behind warmer-climate cultures like Persia, Greece, Rome, Arabia, Egypt, India, China, and Mesoamerica for most of the last 15 millennia? Seems like it should be an overwhelming advantage.

I'd almost take out the "ish" part.

evolution is not linear (or parallel to an other), if requirements differ (IQ, avaible food, temperature etc.)
very old cultures in scandinavia might have already had a higher avg IQ,
but due to the lower temperatur it was a lot harder to get the evolution to a certain point, where basics are save (food, warm place etc.)
what i want to say is that warmer regions were able to reach their maximum of evolution way quicker, since all facors beside average intelligence (IQ) were favourable for them. but after evolution got further and further, the hotter areas were left behind to some point, and the colder areas started to profit from their intelligence.

and since you called me troll(-ish), id like to add that its pretty obv, if you think about it .
and if you google my trollish statement, you will see the hot/cold avg. IQ-thing is true.
of course it might have to do with poverty in hot areas nowadays, but that doesnt change the fact at all,
its just under another light.

sorry for my bad english skills, its not my native language.
btw, i am neither scandinavian nor nazi.

It changes that "fact" tremendously, since we're talking about long-term historical trends. If the relative impoverishment of "warmer" nations is a factor in contemporary IQ, how can you say with any kind of certainty that it should apply to the past, when "warmer" cultures were considerably more technologically developed? Geography is likely at play here, but not because of any effect it has on IQ. Even a cursory bit of research on IQ will show that (1) it's a terrible predictor of a lot of things, and (2) there is far more variation within a given population than across populations with regard to IQ scores. You might not be a racist, but this is precisely the type of nonsense peddled by early 20th-century racists that has no grounding in empirical fact. It's simply latter-day phrenology.

well, certainty and historie...
why dont you tell me one logic reason why this should be a modern phenomenon, a reason why it should not have been like that all the time?

or why did they loose their edge in evolution to others?
(not that i think the technological edge is actually a positive thing at all, i just call it an edge, since the majority of people do that, and i think that evolution already backfires and kills our happyness with modern way of western life)

they were more developed because they had fresh food, like vegetables/fruits avaible and many animals that they could easily hunt. why is saudi-arabis rich? they have oil.
that is why. they had the more favourable circumstances.... under those conditions the less intelligent will develope quicker.

can you follow me now?

i dont get why you asked me that, since i already described that in my last post:

"very old cultures in scandinavia might have already had a higher avg IQ,
but due to the lower temperatur it was a lot harder to get the evolution to a certain point, where basics are save (food, warm place etc.)
what i want to say is that warmer regions were able to reach their maximum of evolution way quicker, since all facors beside average intelligence (IQ) were favourable for them. but after evolution got further and further, the hotter areas were left behind to some point, and the colder areas started to profit from their intelligence."

The bolded parts of this post disappoint, as they fail pretty hard (which is in sharp contrast to what I have come to expect from your posts in my short time in this subforum). The Aztec and Mayan civilizations were most certainly not more developed than the Nords, and for about the last decade I have been continually baffled, mortified, and pissed off at the extent to which new-age academia reveres pre-colombian cultures while making them out to be some highly-advanced, trend-setting world beaters who were supposedly ahead of their Eurasion and Middle-Eastern contemporaries in almost every aspect and yet somehow failed to survive into the present day in any meaningful sense.

Kinda hard when disease pathogens you have no immunity to because you didn't grow up around pigs, cattle, sheep, and horses get introduced into your population.

No one said they were more advanced than all of Eurasia. But their urban and agricultural achievements were quite impressive. The Aztecs had a city of over 250,000 people, something the Europeans could not say since the days of the Roman Empire. They also knew how to create advanced hydraulic systems and build artificial islands.

Europeans were still living in skinned tents while the Chinese had a vast civilization.

They weren't.

America has a long history of extremely complex civilisations. They didn't develop in certain areas because they had no need to. When Europeans first landed in (North)America, the technological disparity was noticeable, but hardly dominant. What killed off the Natives wasn't technology, since the technology that would give Europeans an insurmountable edge over the Natives wouldn't exist for a century or so, what killed off the Natives was disease brought by the Europeans.

As for why the Europeans had this technology, that's due to a complex series of factors including but not limited to, geology, biodiversity, geography, and having trade links with Asia and the Middle East that the Americans didn't have access to.

It's very unlikely that any Earth contains any disease that can be communicated to a species from another planet. It's very unlikely that an alien species could infect any of our species with their diseases either.