I don’t think we give enough weight to just how devastating smallpox was to humanity.
Until we eradicated it, smallpox killed an estimated 500 million people. It continuously killed people from Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs all the way to people in the 1980s. Smallpox collapsed whole civilizations. Eradicating it imo is one of humanity’s greatest victories.
For perspective:
- The highest estimate for Spanish Flu deaths is 100 million.
- Bubonic plague killed an estimated 25 million.
- WW1 killed 22 million.
- WW2 killed 50 million.
Smallpox is monstrous and if it comes back I will fucking sob. It’s horrific, it’s terrifying. Just measles making a comeback is miserable.
Thank Andrew Wakefield and RFK Jr. And many others. Anti-vax shit isn’t new, but these motherfuckers are.
Yes, but consider how many likes we’ve gotten from our mommy groups. /s
Looking at photos of smallpox victims and survivors is nerve wracking. I got vaccinated for smallpox despite it being extinct in the wild.
We were so fucking close to doing that to polio and measels and other diseases, but they are making a comeback due to those motherfuckers.
And that too when a large part of the world (India, China, later Turkey and Europe) actively inoculated their population against it.
Food famine
Opposed to…?
2026 RAM famine 😔
- (A)ztecs
- (I)nca
Dear god.
… Water… famine?
A “famine” is definitionally about food. It inherently denotes “food” unless you modify it with something else, like “cotton famine” or unless the surrounding context makes it entirely unambiguous. A “food famine” is a tautology.
I know, I was joking.
Very fair.
Food drought
I forgot my PIN number at 8am in the morning.
All the neighbors of the Aztecs: “Damn, you took out those assholes? It’ll be nice to have some peace in this region!”
The Spanish Conquistadors:
Except Doom Guy didn’t lose.
He did when I was at the keyboard.
Why only the Aztecs and Incas? Those were only central and south America. Millions more of us were killed by others.
Do you do this every time someone says something specific?
“I’m going to Starbucks” “Why not be millions of other people going to other coffee shops”
When someone says the colonization of native Americans…
… I then ask why my personal specific group wasn’t listed.
Mention number three by notability and population would probably be the Mayans.
No one said that, they’re clearly addressing 2 specific groups of native Americans.
I’m pretty sure the exact story here is still hotly debated. The “it was all the germs” theory gets a bad reaction from historians, as of AskHistorians last existing, but other than that…
