Letters from the January 7, 2006, issue of Science News
By Science News
Death in the Americas
I was wondering if researchers have given any thought to the idea that in the same way that disease devastated human populations after the European discovery of the Americas, perhaps disease was a contributing factor in the demise of much of the fauna of the Western Hemisphere (“Caribbean Extinctions: Climate change probably wasn’t the culprit,” SN: 10/29/05, p. 275). Could domesticated animals traveling with the humans, or maybe wild animals making use of the same pathways, have carried pathogens so alien to the native populations that they perished?