The great dying
Old World diseases kill most of the population of the Americas within a century.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 132 years
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Early Modern, Holocene
Smallpox reaches Hispaniola in 1518 and Mexico in 1520, followed by measles, typhus, influenza and later malaria and yellow fever, against populations with no prior exposure. Estimates of mortality run from 50 to 90 per cent, with the pre-contact population itself contested — perhaps 50 to 60 million people. The reforestation of abandoned farmland was large enough that some researchers detect it in the atmospheric carbon record.