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By Root 1970 0

fleas carry bubonic plague, but the Black Death spread faster—and over colder land—than these animals usually travel. And Y. pestis has never been shown to be as contagious as the Black Death. The epidemic may instead have been of a hemorrhagic fever like Ebola (Scott and Duncan 2001). I am grateful to David Henige for drawing this discussion to my attention. For losses, see, e.g., Wrigley 1969:63.

Population nadir: Ubelaker 1992:169–76, table 3. The 1890 U.S. census listed the Native American population as 237,000 (United States Bureau of the Census 1937:3, table 2). But it is widely believed that the Census Bureau undercounted, both because it did not accurately survey many native areas and because its definition of “Indian” was too restrictive. Most demographers double the reported number.

Zambardino critique: Zambardino 1980 (“the errors multiply,” 8; “meaningful,” 18).

“no better than”: Crosby 1992:175.

Skepticism: Interviews, Ubelaker, Snow; Snow 1995 (“no support,” 1604); 1992; Snow and Lanphear 1988. I believe David Henige coined “Low Counter” and “High Counter.”

Historians’ reluctance: Calloway 2003:415–16 (“boggle,” 415); McNeill 1998:19–23.

1967 measles epidemic: Interviews, Napoleon Chagnon, Thomas Headland, Francis Black, Patrick Tierney; Neel et al. 1970; Neel 1977:155–68. The epidemic became the subject of controversy when U.S. journalist Patrick Tierney accused Neel and his anthropologist coauthor, Chagnon, of exacerbating and perhaps even causing it in the course of an unethical experiment on the effects of vaccination (Tierney 2000). After a furor, researchers generally agreed that the likelihood that Neel and Chagnon had spread measles was negligible (Mann 2000a, 2001; Neel et al. 2001); as the main text indicates, the epidemic apparently originated with the Tootobi missionaries (Headland 2000). The Yanomamo are also known as Yanomami, Yanoama, and Yanomamö, the different terms coming from different dialects.

Distribution of blood types: Crosby 2003b:22–30. For a more complete explanation, see Crawford 1998:95–101.

Relative lack of genetic disease: Author’s interviews, Black, Crosby, Dobyns (cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s chorea); Black 2004:155 (asthma and autoimmune diseases); Hurtado, Hurtado, and Hill 2004:185 (diabetes). Dobyns stressed that the evidence is weak. Because Europeans recorded “things like the lack of beggars and madmen in city streets,” he told me, “you can assemble a sketchy picture” of societies with little genetic disease. “But as Henige would say,” Dobyns remarked of his fiercest critic, “it’s an argument from silence.”

Black and HLA types: Author’s interviews, Black, Stephen S. Hall; Black 1992, 1994, 2004; Crawford 1998:131–34. HLA classes are succinctly explained in Hall 1997:368–69. My thanks to Steve Hall for walking me through this material.

“Europeans’ capacity”: Jennings 1975:22.

Russian fur trade: Standard histories include Fisher 1943; Lincoln 1994.

1768–69 epidemic: Bril 1988:238 (“No one knows”); Samwell 1967:1252–59 (“Ruins,” 1252); Sauer 1802:306–08. Sauer’s death tally of 5,368 is identical to that of the writer William Coxe (Coxe 1780:5) and reasonably congruent with the estimate that “three fourths” of the populace died by French consul Jean Baptiste Barthelemy Lesseps, who was traveling in Kamchatka at the time (Lesseps 1790:128–29 [“three fourths,” 128]). I am grateful to Elizabeth Fenn for providing me with her notes on these references, from which I have taken the material from Lessep and Sauer.

“As soon as”: Füch 1988:169–70. Again I thank Prof. Fenn.

Helper-T cell hypothesis: Hurtado, Hurtado and Hill 2004.

Revolutionary War epidemic: Interviews, Fenn; Fenn 2001 (start of Boston epidemic, 46; ten to thirty a day, 47; one day before the Declaration, 53–54; “Ethiopian regiment,” 57–61; Quebec, 62–71; Adams, 79).

Mexico City epidemic: Calloway 2003:417–19 (“It seems likely,” 561); Fenn 2001:138–40 (Fenn suggests that a third epidemic, which moved west from New Orleans, may have “collided