Globalization and disease Eurasian diseases to the Americas was that many more native peoples were killed by disease and germs than by the colonists' use of guns or other weapons. Scholars estimate that over a period of four centuries, epidemic diseases wiped out as much as 90 percent of the American indigenous populations. In Europe during the age of exploration, diseases such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis (TB) had already been introduced centuries before through trade with Asia and Africa. People had developed some antibodies to these and other diseases from the Eurasian continent. When the Europeans traveled to new lands, they carried
Indigenous people of Oaxaca remained largely an agriculture-based economy with little development throughout the colonial period, following Mexican independence in 1821 and following the revolution of 1910. By the 1980s and 1990s, Oaxaca was one of Mexico's poorest states. The state, and the indigenous people in particular, had some of the nation's highest rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, and infant mortality. The Oto-Manguean languages are a large family comprising several families of Native American languages, which has not been positively related to any other group of languages. The Oto-Manguean family has existed in southern Mexico at least since 4000 BCE and probably before. The highest