Question

What impact did the introduction of smallpox have on the population of the indigenous people?

Answer 1

they died because they wasn't immune to it

Answer 2

Christopher Columbus discovered the New World. When Columbus washed ashore in the Bahamas in 1492, he saw groups of people but he had no idea of the vastness to which he was in front of. There is no way of knowing how many people were here at this time. Nobody was keeping records of that so we have to use spanish accounts, we have to use DNA, and estimations which are getting a little better. We also use archeology and anthropology to kind of come up with a number. So most most experts will hover around 50,000 people. About 50,000 people were in this hemisphere from Alaska to the Straits of Magellan or Tierra Del Fuego. That's a lot of people. So that was around 1492.

We do know that around 100 years later we think that there were about 6,000 people left. Keep in mind that this is before Plymouth and before Jamestown so this is even before the American Colonies. So 6,000 left in 100 years. Now, 6,000 might look like a big number to you but when you stack it up against 50,000, you're looking at about a 92% rate of death in about a generation. That's unnatural and that's a 92% extinction rate in a generation. That's almost a complete wipeout of the people that were here.

Now, the major cause of so many indigenous people dying so quickly was disease. The major cause was from smallpox. Now there were other diseases as well such as the flu and other ones. This happened very fast, it was painful, and it was incurable which caused so many deaths.