The Europeans who arrived in Sydney Cove in Australia from the 1780s onwards weren’t decimated by disease after contact with the local Aboriginal people, whereas the reverse was all too true. Were the local population free of contagious diseases?
• The local population weren’t free of contagious diseases. But the diseases would have been fewer and less virulent than those carried by the Europeans.
In small communities, infectious diseases tend to evolve lower virulence. This is because a more virulent disease kills off a big proportion of the population. A small population might then die out altogether, and with no one…
