Population history of indigenous peoples of the Americas scope of the epidemics over the years was tremendous, killing millions of people—possibly in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating one of "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe", which had killed up to one-third of the people in Europe and Asia between 1347 and 1351. One of the most devastating diseases was smallpox, but other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and pertussis, which were chronic in Eurasia. This transfer of disease between the
Indigenous religious beliefs of the Tagalog people are striking similarities between accounts from the 1500s vis a vis modern folk beliefs today. He describes the account of Miguel de Loarca account, in particular, to be: ""remarkable in that it sounds like what is now called folk Catholicism."" Catholic Scholar Fr. Vitaliano R. Gorospe, meantime, notes:""even today especially in the rural areas, we find merely the external trappings of Catholic belief and practice, superimposed on the original pattern of pre-Christian superstitions and rituals."" Indigenous religious beliefs of the Tagalog people The indigenous religious beliefs of the Tagalog people (sometimes referred to as Anitism, or, less accurately, using the