European Colonization of the Americas Killed So Many It Cooled Earth's Climate

Quiet Canines Podcast · Oct 7, 2026 · 3m

Europe was in the early days of the Renaissance. At the same time, empires in the Americas sustained more than 60 million people. Then Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Within a century, most of them were dead. The collapse of farming that followed was so great that it cooled the global climate.

First contact brought disease. Europeans carried measles, smallpox, influenza and the bubonic plague across the Atlantic. Indigenous people had never been in contact with these pathogens. Their immune systems had evolved in isolation from Eurasian and African populations for 13,000 years…