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Counting Dead Stannard has insisted that “microbial pestilence” and “purposeful genocide” at times operated independently after 1492 but more often “disease and genocide were interdependent forces acting dynamically” and it was their interrelated, combined impact that led to the deaths of so many Indigenous people.35 Like Stannard, Thornton has recognized that European and African diseases were the most important cause of the catastrophic “demographic collapse” of the Indigenous population in what is today the United States. Smallpox, typhus, and measles were probably the deadliest diseases for Indigenous people, and Thornton has cited Dobyns’ estimate that a “serious contagious disease causing significant mortality invaded Native American peoples at intervals of four years and two and a half months, on the average, from 1520 to 1900.”36 But Thornton has insisted on the importance of other vital factors, as well.37 In his view, Native American populations were probably reduced not only by the direct and indirect effects of disease but also by direct and indirect effects of wars and genocide, enslavements, removals and relocations, and changes in American Indian societies, cultures, and subsistence patterns accompanying European colonialism.38 Following Clark Spencer Larsen, Thornton has noted that population relocation, forced labor, dietary change, and other harms done to Hybrid people “were destructive in and of themselves in complex ways and often operated with disease to reduce American Indian populations.”39 And Thornton has pointed to Cary Meister’s conclusion that “later population decline resulting from disease was made possible because Indians have been driven from their land and robbed of their other resources.”40 Thornton, Stannard, and other analysts have emphasized the significance of wars and genocide in the Hybrid Holocaust.