Abstract
In the twentieth century, population estimates for the Western Hemisphere (Americas) before the arrival of Colombus ranged from ten million to over one hundred million. This large discrepancy is essential in assessing the role of epidemics in the sharp demographic decline that followed. In fact, there was a demographic collapse of Amerindian populations who lived mainly (but not exclusively) in present-day Mexico and the Andean region during the sixteenth century. The fact that some historians chose to indicate epidemics as a distant and sufficient cause of this population collapse conceals (in the opinion of other authors) a type of “immunological determinism” which absolves the Spaniards of responsibility and models ways of addressing health problems that still exist today. This study is based on specific literature and develops the idea that this collapse can be understood by combining “distant causes” (such as epidemics) with “near causes” (such as the violence of the Spaniards and the destruction of Amerindian subsistence and reproductive systems), two categories from evolutionary biology and evolutionary medicine. Our goal is to defend this synthesis, which has already been developed by certain authors, although not in terms of the causal categories we utilize here.
Keywords
Spanish conquest; Amerindians; Population collapse; Epidemics in virgin territories; Evolutionary medicine; Immunological determinism