[Aztlan] African Olmecs

[Sam Edgerton]

Hi Steven: Whenever the diseases you mention, small pox and measles in 
particular, first arrived in the New World, they did not exist here before 
Columbus.  It would certainly seem that between 11000 BC and 1492 AD, among 
the many putative landings of lost adventurers on these shores, whether 
Japanese, Melanesian, African, or even Irish, someone would have introduced 
a Eurasian-African germ. Only one person needs to transmit it; only one 
person needs to catch it before  a whole population is quickly infected. 
Shouldn't we suspect that at least one of these supposed pre-Columbian 
visitors would arrive sick? In any case during all those ten millennia no 
such American small pox or measles epidemic ever happened, thus "endemic 
immunity" was never conferred - until after the devastating plagues of the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Sam Edgerton