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GUNS. GERMS, AND STEEL

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GUNS. GERMS, AND STEEL
Guns, Germs, and Steel; Diseases Disease influenced a lot of the world’s history, how these disease reached human, and how over a period of time we became mutated to these diseases. It affected a lot of wars, and settlements, such as when the new world was discovered. Most of the germs from these diseases came from domesticated animals, and people from the Old world. Diseases have even been the cause of wars. Around 1526 the Atahuallpa had won battles in a civil war that had left the Incas vulnerable and divided. An epidemic of smallpox was that was spreading among South American Indians, which had arrived from Spanish settlers, had killed the Inca’s emperor, Emperor Huayna Capac and then his designated heir, Ninan Cuyuchi. The deaths of the emperor and the heir lead to Atahuallpa and Huascar to compete for the throne. The civil war started because of the epidemic of smallpox leading to two very important death. This situation also emphasized on the lack of immunity certain people had towards smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, bubonic plague, and other diseases.(77) Diseases brought by the Europeans killed around ninety-five percent of pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populated native societies disappeared for being affected by epidemic of diseases around 1462 and the late 1600s. In 1713 a smallpox epidemic, caused by European settlers, became the destruction of South Africa’s native San people(78).The spread of diseases helped people conquer other people.(86) Wild plants and animal species appropriate for domestication helped certain diseases reach humans (86, 86, and 92). Human who domesticated animals were the first to get sick with the new diseases, however it helped them evolve resistance towards these diseases. Other people who had not been exposed to any of these diseases would have a harder time at surviving it. Germs that came from domesticated animals played a significant role in the European conquests of

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