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HarryHacker42 t1_jed9408 wrote

Smallpox is an offshoot of a horse/camel disease, so no horses meant no smallpox which meant the natives were unprepared when the Europeans and others brought smallpox and horses.

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The-Crawling-Chaos t1_jedv5my wrote

Horsepox is not contagious to humans. Cowpox is, and it shares some acquired immunity with smallpox. Smallpox is believed to have evolved from a rodent poxvirus. Smallpox is not known to infect horses (or any other nonhumans).

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jjmc123a t1_jed1l9n wrote

The article fails to mention why horses disappeared -. it was because of a volcano which killed all but a small group in the mountains of Spain (see the book "The Horse"). What was surprising to me and was that horses originated in the western US

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GeoGeoGeoGeo OP t1_jed896h wrote

Horses are one of the multitude of North American megafauna that disappeared during the Pleistocene extinction event. There are no volcanic events that are believed to have directly caused the extinction of horses or other large mammals.

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Burnbrook t1_jee0b6t wrote

Humans hunted equids and camelids of North America to extinction, paired with the radical weather changes of the Younger Drias.

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