America discovered: speculation?

Actually, europeans did bring back several diseases. My assumption would be that Europeans had better medicine, which allowed their diseases to increase in strength while still being tolerable, meanwhile the native americans diseases never really mutated over hundreds or thousands of years.

I'm just speculating, and I know it's off subject.

As for diseases, SCoates is right. Chief among the new diseases that Columbus's sailors brought back to Europe was Syphilis. It was quite devastating at first until people figured out that it was sexually transmitted.

There's much more to why the Europeans were able to overcome the native populations of the New World than disease transmission. The question has been frquently asked, why didn't Montezuma, say, raise a fleet of ships and have the Aztecs sail east to "discover" and conquer Spain? The answers are quite complex. I recommend you read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for some very enlightening speculative answers to these questions.

For some simple answers, guns played a big role, but so did culture, when the spanish came to attack they were actually welcomed by the Aztecs, by some cruel misunderstanding of customs.

Some Aztecs thought that Cortez was a reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent, as he arrived at a time and from a direction prophecied by the myths.

Don't be misled by the title of Diamond's book. As you say, SCoates, guns played only a part in the conquest and Diamond never says otherwise. The answers he comes up with are never simplistic.

Whether or not syphillis comes from the Americas or from Subsaharan Africa is a matter of some debate with, I think, most thinking it has an African provenance, though it did appear just after Colombus' discovery of America.

Whatever the case may be, nothing germ-wise encountered in the Americas was as lethal as smallpox was to the Americans. 9 in 10 died from the disease. The lethality is not due to better medicine in the West, the practices of doctors in the West don't merit any praise until much much later. Apparently, for lethal diseases virgin populations -- populations with no history of contact with the virus or similar strains -- will have very high death rates.

The best book I've read on this subject is Plagues and Peoples, by William H. McNeill -- an excellent account of the interaction between history and disease. One of the best books of history I've ever read, in fact.

By simple, I only meant that the way I worded it was simple, since I don't know the more complex explanations.

Actually, it has recently been demonstrated that syphillis in Europe pre-dated exploration of the Americas on a large scale. See the PBS program Secrets of the Dead.

The native Americans discovered this continent: There is some speculation based on linguistic evidence that the so-called natives came from several places in Asia and entered No and So America at several points.

i didn't know that all i know is that the vikings were the first to discover america

For the native americans smallpox was the big killer. It decimated tribes even more than bullets. Given the number of Indians killed in battle and massacres that's really surprising.

No, the Native Americans discovered it before them.

And even the Vikings might not have been the first Europeans to land here, either. Ever hear of the Voyage of St. Brendan, an Irish monk of the early Middle Ages?

No, I haven't, please tell.

There's also some innuendo about the Basques having had fishing grounds in the Americas before Columbus.

There is a sort of a what-if in which the American indians might have been significantly worse off than they were dealing with the Europeans. That would be if the Mongol empire had not collapsed in China in the mid 1300s, and Mongol armies aboard Chinese ships had reached the Americas in the late 1300 - early 1400s. Not much would have had to happen diffeent for that to have occurred.

There are many theroies about discovery. It has been shown that the Spainish used maps that the Portuguese had gotten from the Chinese.

How China sailed around the world in 1421.

Joe (more later) Nation