Quake3World

Faced with such stories, historians have long wondered how many people lived in the Americas at the time of contact. "Debated since Columbus attempted a partial census on Hispaniola in 1496," William Denevan has written, this "remains one of the great inquiries of history." (In 1976 Denevan assembled and edited an entire book on the subject, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492.) The first scholarly estimate of the indigenous population was made in 1910 by James Mooney, a distinguished ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution. Combing through old documents, he concluded that in 1491 North America had 1.15 million inhabitants. Mooney's glittering reputation ensured that most subsequent researchers accepted his figure uncritically.

That changed in 1966, when Henry F. Dobyns published "Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate," in the journal Current Anthropology. Despite the carefully neutral title, his argument was thunderous, its impact long-lasting. In the view of James Wilson, the author of The Earth Shall Weep (1998), a history of indigenous Americans, Dobyns's colleagues "are still struggling to get out of the crater that paper left in anthropology." Not only anthropologists were affected. Dobyns's estimate proved to be one of the opening rounds in today's culture wars.

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Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe.

His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared—"virgin soil," in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so.

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Back home in the Americas, Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

Foo wrote:To put that in perspective, that's about 1/3rd of the US population today. With all the big cities and dense housing districts. We're talking about a population which was largely nomadic at the time, also.

It just doesn't fit within the realms of likelyhood.

Transient wrote:Read "Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen if you're interested in stuff like this. I wish I had reaad the book before I graduated high school; I would have been a major thorn in the side of my History teacher. :icon32:

Kracus wrote:I even heard so far as them catapulting dead horses into the villages, kindof a biological warfare to get things started for America. What else is new eh?

losCHUNK wrote:corpses were being catapulted into castles and cities when king arthurs horny grandma was in nappies

Kracus wrote:Yeah but can you shoot a fucking horse into a fortified village?

Ryoki wrote:

Kracus wrote:Yeah but can you shoot a fucking horse into a fortified village?

Goddamn it's annoying how you so often completely miss the point.

EDIT:

- horses don't transmit human disease (quickly)
- they had no catapults
- the Mongolian thing sounds incredibly familiar doesn't it. Except that one was actually documentated.

IE you are confused.

Foo wrote:To put that in perspective, that's about 1/3rd of the US population today. With all the big cities and dense housing districts. We're talking about a population which was largely nomadic at the time, also.

It just doesn't fit within the realms of likelyhood.