Attention Economy


Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Europeans in the New World

New technology leads to the discovery of an ancient lost city in the Honduran jungle:
“Around 1500, something catastrophic appeared to have happened in T1 that triggered the abandonment of the city …
It was, more likely, disease that had devastated this city. To understand the collapse of this mysterious civilization, we have to go back to October of 1493, when Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the New World with an enormous flotilla of seventeen ships carrying fifteen hundred men and thousands of head of livestock. Columbus and his men also unwittingly carried microscopic pathogens from Europe, to which the people of the New World had no genetic resistance. His travels throughout the Caribbean unleashed the first of a series of deadly pandemics that swept the Caribbean and Central America….
Anthropologists have documented that, between 1518 and 1550, almost ninety per cent of the native people of Honduras died of disease.”