Another Look at Indians (Native Americans, Amerindians)

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Native Americans tend to be cast in the part of sufferers of White aggression and unbridled violence in the territories known collectively as the usa. But the very first massacre was committed by Indians in Virginia in 1622, from the colony Jamestown. They slaughtered 347 men, women and children.

Europeans are also accused of importing disease causing agents, pathogens, such as measles and smallpox, malaria and yellow fever. Indigenous people had no resistance to such illnesses since they were never subjected to them.

But recent findings from a team of anthropologists, economists and paleopathologists who’ve completed a large study of the health of people living in the Western Hemisphere at the past 7,000 years – suggest that Native American’s health was severely conducted long before the Europeans introduced the coup de grace.

The researchers analyzed over 12,500 skeletons – half them pre-Columbian – from 65 sites in North and South America.

The study -“The Backbone of History: Health and Nutrition in the Western Hemisphere”, edited by Dr. Richard H. Steckel and Dr. Jerome C. Rose – discovered that the haleness of Native-Americans diminished markedly from the 1000 years before Columbus”discovered” them.

The majority of these skeletons showed signs of degenerative joint disease, deteriorating oral health, height, anemia, detained trauma, infections and tissue development from injuries. These were imputed by the participants to diets and congestion. People became shorter and expired earlier – to average at age 35 – because the centuries passed.

“Pre-Columbian inhabitants were among the safest and also the least healthy in our sample,” Dr. Steckel and Dr. Rose stated. “While pre-Columbian natives might have dwelt in a disease environment considerably different from that at other areas of the world, the original inhabitants also brought with them, or evolved with, enough pathogens to create chronic ailments of ill health under states of systematic agriculture and urban living.”

Additionally, there are signs which diseases hitherto thought to have been introduced with the white explorers were actually indigenous.1,000-year-old Peruvian mummies, for instance, were found to have been infected with tuberculosis in their arteries.