•Archaeologists and geographers have been trying to estimate the pre-Columbian population of the Americas for decades. But this is a very difficult task. When Christopher Columbus set foot on the island now known as San Salvador in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he encountered the indigenous people who greeted him, traded with him, and lived on nearby islands. In his journal, Columbus described these people, who were the first to meet him.
But just a few decades after Columbus’s arrival, the indigenous people of the Americas declined rapidly, due to a combination of disease, war, and enslavement, as anthropologist Eric Wolf described it.
For centuries, researchers have tried to figure out how many indigenous people lived in the Americas just before the arrival of European colonists. The answer to this question has remained surprisingly unclear; historical census records, archaeological sites, and estimates based on the carrying capacity of the semi-submerged land bridge have varied widely.
Recent studies of indigenous demography have shown that the population reached a peak several centuries before the arrival of Europeans. If the Europeans had arrived during that peak period, the history of the continent might have been completely different.
Early estimates
Humans have been living in the Americas for tens of thousands of years, crossing over from the Bering Strait. Archaeological evidence suggests that the first Americans spread rapidly into the new lands they encountered. But there is a great deal of uncertainty about the population during the period between the Bering Strait crossing and Columbus’s arrival; estimates for the number of indigenous people living across the strait in 1492 ranged from one million to 112 million.
In a statement to Live Science, the Penn State University anthropologist said, “We don’t have good numerical estimates. The numbers are all over the place.”
One of the first modern researchers to attempt to quantify the pre-Columbian indigenous population was the anthropologist Dobyns. In one study, Dobyns used estimates of how many people different land types could support and records of epidemics in the 16th century to arrive at an estimated indigenous population of about 112 million — more than 100 times higher than some earlier experts believed. “In summary, Dobyns filled the land to its maximum carrying capacity, so that all similar lands environmentally were populated with the same number of people,” said Milner. “He also assumed that the epidemic was widespread and universal, which would make sense if the land was full.”
In one study, Milner and geographer Chaplin focused on data from eastern North America; by compiling historical group sizes and the sizes of archaeological settlements, they estimated the location and size of “population communities.” Using this method, their general estimate for eastern U.S. and southeastern Canada was about 1.6 million people. Milner and Chaplin wrote, “Our average estimates suggest that North America, before the dramatic reduction of indigenous populations by European diseases in the early 16th century, contained roughly 2.8 to 5.7 million people, or ‘best estimate’ of 3.8 million.”
In one study, Kelly and his co-authors found a similar peak time. By that time, CARD’s dataset had grown, making the estimates more robust. In the study, the researchers wrote: “Although it was devastated by contact with Europeans, the indigenous population simply peaked in the 1500s and then declined.” In fact, they found evidence of a slight recovery in the population count just before 1500.
“World population has more than doubled in my lifetime, which is unprecedented in human history,” said Milner. “Environmental scientists are trying to look at what happened over long time scales to give us a range of what might happen in the future. We need to make some conscious decisions about how we manage our landscape and adapt to these changes.”
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