It seems a dramatic thing to state, it’s true. The Columbian Exchange could have caused human extinction. Today I’ll explain how. It involves a bit of counterfactual history, of course, given that humanity is not extinct. If you need to read my last post to understand how this became possible, click here.
We left off by establishing the situation in the Americas prior to 1492. The people there domesticated only a handful of animal species, had very few contagious diseases as a result, and lived, by the standards of the pre-modern world, disease-free lives.
Things were different in Asia, Africa, and Europe. People there achieved the widespread domestication of many animals. As a result, many contagious diseases afflicted people. This killed many before their time. But the survivors developed some immunity.
The Columbian Exchange Begins
The year 1492, for all the controversy it sometimes generates today, was a crucial one biologically. It brought the Americas into contact with the result of the world for the first time in millennia. When European explorers, traders, soldiers, and colonists came to the Americas they brought contagious diseases with them. Malaria, for instance, probably arrived on either the second or third voyage of Colombo to the Caribbean.
This proved calamitous for the peoples of the Americas. Recall, for instance, what happened to Europe when the Black Plague arrived in 1347. With no immunity, somewhere between 35% and 60% of Europeans died. That was from one brand new contagious disease.
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The Europeans arriving in the Americas had not one, but many, contagious diseases brand new to people in the Americas. With smallpox taking the greatest toll, native people died in unbelievable numbers. People who lived in large cities, like the Aztecs in Mexico’s Central Valley, had no chance. Some historians estimate a 97% decline in population in Central Mexico in the first century after contact with Europeans.
What About Human Extinction?
Everything I’ve written so far is factual. Here is where we must get a little counterfactual. The deleterious effect of disease on indigenous Americans ravaged people from Canada to Argentina. In my next post I’ll describe how it allowed Spanish conquistadors to defeat the Aztec and Inca empires despite the odds, the Puritans to settle Massachusetts, and some other examples of situations Europeans benefited from.
First, however, consider this alternate possibility. What if the Americas had boasted a long list of animals that humans could tame and domesticate like Europe, Asia, and Africa did? Instead of hosting llamas, alpacas, guinea pigs, turkeys, and ducks (that’s the entire list of domestic species in the Americas), what if the Americas had featured the equivalent of horses, camels, oxen, chickens, and so forth? Or, in another alternative, what if the large species of animals the Americas did have, like bears or bison, were amenable to domestication?
Continuing from this starting point, the same process we saw in Europe, Africa, and Asia of animal diseases mutating into human form would follow. This would give people in the Americas a wide array of contagious diseases. But, and here’s the kicker, they would be different diseases than those carried by Europeans on arrival. In this scenario, both sides of the Columbian Exchange would infect the other. European traders sailing back to Europe would bring contagious illnesses with them. Like the Black Death in 1347, they would spread from port cities to the interior, mowing down populations.
The Downward Spiral of Human Extinction
To finish this macabre scenario, population levels on both sides of the Atlantic crash after 1492. Economies crash along with them due to instability and a lack of consumers of goods. Cities, the places most vulnerable to contagious disease due to people living in proximity to each other, become ghost towns. Most of the wonderful inventions we’ve seen since 1492 never happen because the inventors are never born.
In this alternate history, human populations dwindle to isolated pockets. In actual history, it took a long time for science to learn how diseases work and spread. The germ theory of disease came about in late 1800s. (Which is, not coincidentally, the time when Native American population in the US finally stopped dropping and began to increase once more.) This is nearly 400 years after the Columbian Exchange.
In our nightmare scenario, this means a 400-year gap between when diseases start ravaging populations and when people finally master the science that might prevent this. Except, in our alternate reality, it would take much longer than 400 years. With fewer scientific thinkers alive, the pace of accretion of knowledge about science would drop to a crawl. Human extinction really does become an open question.
Returning to Actual History
This is all speculation about a possible human extinction, of course. But it demonstrates the importance of the Columbian Exchange. The fact that a population crash did occur on one side of the Atlantic is bad enough. This reshaped world history in numerous ways. I’ll describe some of them in future posts.
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As always, I welcome constructive and polite discussion in the comments section. Thank you!
A question about the Black Plague map – why are there a few pockets untouched by the plague, a particularly large one around Crakow? I find that furious.
I think it depends on the place, Sue. Some remote mountainous areas were isolated enough in the 1340s and 1350s they might have kept the plague out through isolation. I’ve never read for certain, but I’d guess the one around Milan is because they successfully quarantined (yes – even medieval people were smart enough to attempt to quarantine themselves, even though it usually failed) from outsiders. Most towns and cities had walls, and if you closed your gates you at least had a chance to keep people out.
Many recent scholars have found that images of the “Dance of Death” preceded the Black Death. Medieval Christian art before the Black Death often included figures of winged death with a scythe, the Danse Macabre, and “The Three Living and the Three Dead.” These images were not just a reaction to the plague, but instead a way that medieval Europeans understood their relationship with death and their continuing connection to the dead. Court masques even staged version of the Danse Macabre as entertainment. The main theme of the image is the leveling nature of death, which of course does resonate with our ideas of the plague and the Black Death may have inspired some of these artistic works, but the philosophical ideas behind this image reflect medieval people’s desire to affirm the positive aspects of death and the continued relationship that the living have with the dead (spiritually or artistically). For further context, see https://www.salon.com/2018/10/30/how-the-dead-danced-with-the-living-in-medieval-society_partner/
Thank you for this addition, Jennifer. I wasn’t meaning to imply that image was only associated with the Black Plague – only that one saw a lot of it at the time.