this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Explanation: For those of you who are not aware, when Europe made contact with the Americas, it unwittingly brought along a whole host of diseases that Native Americans did not have any natural resistance to. For this reason, disease swept through the Americas after the European arrival, causing the total collapse of several Native civilizations, and leading to a massive depopulation and a near-post-apocalyptic landscape, with entire villages being killed or abandoned due to these new diseases.
Naturally, this depopulation and destabilization did the Native Americans no favors when Euro colonists came sniffing around to claim 'virgin' lands.
Europeans also intentionally gave natives blankets infected with smallpox.
Not until some ~250 years after contact, at which point the mass depopulation had already happened, and it's unclear if the crude attempt at biological warfare by the British even worked.