When European colonists set foot in the Americas, they ultimately brought about the crippling depopulation of Native communities.
New research from Harvard University reveals, however, that the large-scale decline began more than a century later than is commonly believed.
Tracing the devastation of Native Americans in the Southwest U.S. to the missionary efforts of the 1620s, the study suggests that waves of epidemic diseases, violence, and famine which followed wiped out near-entire communities in just decades.
As European settlers arrived, they brought infectious diseases, including smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, scarlet fever, chicken pox, yellow fever, and whooping cough.
