This is MY America!

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Interesting point, but here's another that seems even more valid: Europe, Africa, and Asia are all land-connected and in each of these places, animal husbandry is practiced. Smallpox in particular is associated with keeping cattle, as in all likelihood it's a small mutation of cowpox. Waves of smallpox infections can travel back and forth from one end of a continent and then back, like reflected waves off a seawall. Multiple continents, inhabited by humans, seem to mean a deeper pool of varied human diseases. Add in some other vectors (by a roll of the genetic dice) and look what you come up with.

Excellent point.
These cattle-vector disease were not present in the Americas; because #1 no cattle! and #2 the aforementioned decontaminated populace.

A curiously overlooked factor in the "settling" of the "new lands" was that everywhere the Europeans went, there were empty villages and crops already planted! At the time, the massive scale of biological depopulation was well-documented, usually attributed to a gift from God. It is questionable whether European culture would have been able to sustain an outpost of their civilization, had it not been for nature's "helping hand" ...

Our history textbooks, by omitting the disease factor, leave a story in which the Europeans, even if not sqeaky clean on a moral basis, at least prevailed due to some inherent superiority over the Native people. This is Eurocentricism, in other words White Supremacy.