Ed Barnhart: observation

Transcript context

…So this whole period when Christopher Columbus came, how did that change everything? Well, there’s a great anthropological body of literature. Anthropological body of literature. It’s called the Columbian Exchange based on Columbus. But it’s all this trade back and forth between the new world and the old world. And the old world got just wonderful stuff. All of a sudden their diet didn’t suck. All these vegetables came in. The new world got herd animals. It got pigs and cows and goats that it didn’t have, but it also got 13 infectious diseases. Europe had had wave after wave and kind of had herd immunity on a lot of things, but it didn’t actually go away. It just couldn’t spread like a wildfire through the community. So when they arrived to the Americas, all of a sudden these just a pile of horrible diseases hit people. I think in the first 20, 30 years, there were people who had contracted multiple deadly diseases at once and died of them. But the numbers, it’s a shameful part of history, and it wasn’t something that Europe perpetrated on them. Medical science at that time was still the four humors theory, that people were made of yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. And we did things like, well, you’ve got to bleed him. He’ll feel better then. So we had no idea what an infectious disease was, but the reality was that this horde of diseases hit everyone. And the numbers are now saying in the first 50 years that 90% of everybody was dead, and that the number of people has increased as well as far as our estimates. We’re thinking it’s somewhere around 150 million people and 90% of them died. And with them, all their knowledge. Just, I mean, imagine the moment where who dies when things get bad? It’s the young and the old. So all the knowledge keepers die suddenly. The children die. This next generation that’s half taught and now completely demoralized thinking that this is a spiritual attack, that their gods hate them, that the only way out of it is to accept this new Christianity. But they don’t want to have to bring kids into this world where everybody’s dying. And even if they do, they can’t teach them what the old people were going to teach them because the old people are gone and didn’t finish the transmission. So in a single terrible moment in human history, the generation loses all their knowledge. So a lot of the things these people knew just blipped out. But with that also, just the wisdom of the entire civilizations-…

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