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 religious beliefs of the Tagalog people 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 general term ""animism"") were well documented by Spanish missionaries, mostly in the form of epistolary accounts ("relaciones") and as entries in the various dictionaries put together by missionary friars. Archeological and linguistic evidence indicates that these beliefs date back to the arrival of Austronesian peoples, although elements were later syncretistically adapted from Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Islam. Many of these indigenous beliefs persist to this day, in sycretistic forms discussed by scholars as Philippine variations