bonmgt.net Population history of American indigenous peoples

There were millions of Indians, who had arrived from Asia, living in the Americas when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. Columbus' voyage to what Europeans called the "New World" set the stage for the later European colonization of the Americas, with millions of emigrants (willing and unwilling) from the "Old World" eventually resettling in the Americas. While the population of Old World peoples in the Americas steadily grew in the centuries after Columbus, the population of the American indigenous peoples plummeted. The extent and causes of this population decline have long been the subject of controversy and debate, which became particularly widespread in 1992 during the 500th anniversary of Columbus' famous voyage, with a number of people claiming that the Indians living in the Americas had been the victims of Spanish genocide.

Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; in the 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, precise pre-Columbian population figures are impossible to obtain; estimates are often produced by extrapolation from comparatively small bits of data. In 1976, geographer William Denevan used these various estimates to derive a "consensus count" of about 54 million people, although some recent estimates are lower than that.

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Historian David Henige, representing a self-described "minority opinion", has argued that many population figures are the result of arbitrary formulas selectively applied to numbers from unreliable historical sources, a deficiency he sees as being unrecognized by several contributors to the field. He believes there is not enough solid evidence to produce population numbers that have any real meaning, and characterizes the modern trend of high estimates as "pseudo-scientific number-crunching." Henige does not advocate a low population estimate; rather, he argues that the scanty and unreliable nature of the evidence renders broad estimates suspect, and that "high counters" (as he calls them) have been particularly flagrant in their misuse of sources. Although Henige's criticisms are directed against some specific instances, other studies do generally acknowledge the inherent difficulties in producing reliable statistics given the almost complete lack of any hard data for the period in question.

This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Low estimates were sometimes reflective of European notions of their own cultural and racial superiority, as historian Francis Jennings has argued: "Scholarly wisdom long held that Indians were so inferior in mind and works that they could not possibly have created or sustained large populations." At the other end of the spectrum, some have argued that contemporary estimates of a high pre-Columbian indigenous population are rooted in a bias against aspects of Western civilization and/or Christianity. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe often favoring wildly higher figures."

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Since civilizations rose and fell in the Americas before Columbus arrived, the indigenous population in 1492 was not necessarily at a high point, and may have already been in decline. Indigenous populations in most areas of the Americas reached a low point by the early twentieth century, and in a number of cases started to climb again. The earliest European immigrants offered two principal explanations for the population decline of the American natives. The first was the brutal practices of the Spanish conquistadors, as recorded by the Spanish themselves, most notably by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, whose writings vividly depict atrocities committed on the natives by the Spanish. The second explanation was religious: God had removed the natives as part of His divine plan in order to make way for a new Christian civilization. Many natives of the Americas also understood their troubles in terms of religious or supernatural causes. Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives.

Disease began to kill immense numbers of indigenous Americans soon after Europeans and Africans began to arrive in the New World, bringing with them the infectious diseases of the Old World. One reason this death toll was overlooked (or downplayed) for so long is that disease, according to the widely held theory, raced ahead of European immigration in many areas, thus often killing off a sizable portion of the population before European observations (and thus written records) were made. Many European immigrants who arrived after the epidemics had already killed massive numbers of American natives assumed that the natives had always been few in number. The scope of the epidemics over the years was enormous, killing millions of people—in excess of 90% of the population in the hardest hit areas—and creating "the greatest human catastrophe in history, far exceeding even the disaster of the Black Death of medieval Europe."

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The most devastating disease was smallpox, but other deadly diseases included typhus, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, mumps, yellow fever, and whooping cough. The Americas also had endemic diseases, perhaps including a type of syphilis, which soon became rampant in the Old World. (This transfer of disease between the Old and New Worlds was part of the phenomenon known as the "Columbian Exchange.") But the diseases brought to the New World proved to be exceptionally deadly. The epidemics had very different effects in different parts of the Americas. The most vulnerable groups were those with a relatively small population. Many island based groups were utterly annihilated. The Caribs and Arawaks of the Caribbean nearly ceased to exist, as did the Beothuks of Newfoundland. While disease ranged swiftly through the densely populated empires of Mesoamerica, the more scattered populations of North America saw a slower spread. A disease (viral or bacterial) that kills its victims before they can spread it to others tends to flare up and then die out, like a forest fire running out of fuel. A successful disease establishes an equilibrium, which means the victims live long enough after infection to further spread the disease. Hence there is a long-term evolution process tending to select against quick lethality, and for relative mildness. There is also an evolutionary pressure on the victim populations. Those without resistance to common diseases die and do not leave descendants; those who survive have children, and may pass the genes conferring resistance to their children. Thus both diseases and victim populations tend to evolve towards an equilibrium in which the common diseases are non-symptomatic, mild, or manageably chronic. When a population that has been relatively isolated is exposed to new diseases, they have no inborn resistance to the new diseases (they are "biologically naïve") and succumb at much higher rates, resulting in what is known as a "virgin soil" epidemic. Before the European arrival, the Americas had been isolated from the Eurasian-African landmass. The people of the Old World had had thousands of years to accommodate to their common diseases; the natives of the Americas faced them all at once.

Other contributing factors:

People fled whenever there were outbreaks of disease, which inadvertently helped spread the disease even further. This also left few people behind to care for the infected people, who often died from lack of food and water.

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Native American medical treatments such as sweat baths and cold water immersion (practiced in some areas) weakened patients and probably increased mortality rates. Europeans brought so many deadly diseases with them because they had many more domesticated animals than the Native Americans. Domestication usually means close and frequent contact between animals and people, which is an opportunity for diseases of domestic animals to mutate and migrate into the human population. (In the colder areas of the Eurasian landmass, houses were often built in two stories. The bottom story was used to stable animals, the top to house humans. In winter, the animal heat would rise and warm the human section of the house. This arrangement is efficient, but it also contributes to disease.) The Eurasian landmass extends many thousands of miles along an east-west axis. Climate zones also extend for thousands of miles, which facilitated the spread of agriculture, domestication of animals, and the diseases associated with domestication. The Americas extend mainly north and south, which, according to a theory popularized by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, meant that it was much harder for cultivated plant species, domesticated animals, and diseases to spread.

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Population history of American indigenous peoples