EnvironmentNorth America
The American population collapse
Nine in ten die of diseases they had never met
See it on the timeline →In depth
The cause is that Eurasia had livestock for thousands of years and so diseases that jumped from animals to people; the Americas had almost no domesticated animals. The consequences were global: so much farmland returned to forest that atmospheric CO₂ fell measurably, and some researchers link this to the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century.
For children
Smallpox, measles and influenza did not exist in the Americas before Europeans arrived. Without resistance, perhaps nine in ten people died within a century. It is probably the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history.
Connects to
Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org