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By Root 1894 0

becomes human smallpox. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in constant contact with many animals. They domesticated only the dog; the turkey (in Mesoamerica); and the llama, the alpaca, the Muscovy duck, and the guinea pig (in the Andes). In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.

The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.”

Could a few pigs truly wreak this much destruction? Such apocalyptic scenarios have invited skepticism since Henry Dobyns first drew them to wide attention. After all, no eyewitness accounts exist of the devastation—none of the peoples in the Southeast had any form of writing known today. Spanish and French narratives cannot be taken at face value, and in any case say nothing substantial about disease. (The belief that epidemics swept through the Southeast comes less from European accounts of the region than from the disparities among those accounts.) Although the archaeological record is suggestive, it is also frustratingly incomplete; soon after the Spaniards visited, mass graves became more common in the Southeast, but there is yet no solid proof that a single Indian in them died of a pig-transmitted disease. Asserting that De Soto’s visit caused the subsequent collapse of the Caddo and Coosa may be only the old logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Not only do archaeologists like Dobyns, Perttula, and Ramenofsky argue that unrecorded pandemics swept through the Americas, they claim that the diseases themselves were of unprecedented deadliness. As a rule, viruses, microbes, and parasites do not kill the majority of their victims—the pest that wipes out its host species has a bleak evolutionary future. The influenza epidemic of 1918, until AIDS the greatest epidemic of modern times, infected tens of millions around the world but killed fewer than 5 percent of its victims. Even the Black Death, a symbol of virulence, was not as deadly as these epidemics are claimed to be. The first European incursion of the Black Death, in 1347–51, was a classic virgin-soil epidemic; mutation had just created the pulmonary version of the bacillus Yersinia pestis. But even then the disease killed perhaps a third of its victims. The Indians in De Soto’s path, if researchers are correct, endured losses that were anomalously greater. How could this be true? the skeptics ask.

Consider, too, the Dobynsesque