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[...] After all, who needs a hole in the head? Yet for thousands of years, trepanation -- the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium -- was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma, but possibly to quell headaches, seizures and mental illnesses, or even to expel perceived demons.
[...] "In Incan times, the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent, and during the Civil War, it was between 46 and 56 percent. That's a big difference. The question is how did the ancient Peruvian surgeons have outcomes that far surpassed those of surgeons during the American Civil War?"
[...] Whatever their methods, ancient Peruvians had plenty of practice. More than 800 prehistoric skulls with evidence of trepanation -- at least one but as many as seven telltale holes -- have been found in the coastal regions and the Andean highlands of Peru, the earliest dating back to about 400 B.C. That's more than the combined total number of prehistoric trepanned skulls found in the rest of the world.
Source: Remarkable skill of ancient Peru's cranial surgeons
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:29PM (1 child)
No.
There were just as many unfamiliar germs and diseases in the new world as there were Europe, or the far east. Its just that the locals were pretty much well prepared to fight those diseases off. Sad to say, there was no Garden of Eden. Someone lied to you.
Contrary to popular belief locals did not all die of European imported diseases. While its true that Spanish conquistadors led by Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, respectively, resulted in large part from epidemics of smallpox and measles virus infection that decimated the native defenders, this decimation took a decade to materialize. Indigenous populations did not drop like flies from disease while on the battle field.
Their own religion was used against them. They believe Cortes was Quetzalcoatl (a god) and for the most part were easily recruited against their leaders.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:46PM
I mostly agree that there were plenty of germs around the Americas pre-Columbus, and Peruvians, Incas et.al. had their own cities with clusters of humans to breed human specific germs, but... I don't think that the American cities were as dense or well connected as the cess-pool commerce centers of Europe at the time. In other words, I'm hypothesizing that it wasn't so much luck that the Europeans won the disease war, but more that they had trained for it for centuries and came out on top by virtue of having lived in greater squalor for many previous generations.
The Americas, and the tropics in particular, are full of all kinds of nasty diseases, even today, but the really brutal wipe out your whole village stuff like small-pox, plague, etc. seem to have been a European specialty.
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