Posted on 01/31/2019 7:36:19 AM PST by BenLurkin
It's the UCL group's estimate that 60 million people were living across the Americas at the end of the 15th Century (about 10% of the world's total population), and that this was reduced to just five or six million within a hundred years.
The scientists calculated how much land previously cultivated by indigenous civilisations would have fallen into disuse, and what the impact would be if this ground was then repossessed by forest and savannah.
Are there lessons for modern climate policy?
Co-author Dr Chris Brierley believes there is. He said the fall-out from the terrible population crash and re-wilding of the Americas illustrated the challenge faced by some global warming solutions.
...UCL team argues that the Great Dying in the Americas shows there are significant human interactions that left a deep and indelible mark on the planet long before the mid-20th Century.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
From the cited article:
“Not many years later Thomas Morton walked the forests around Boston harbor and saw “in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live, to tell what became of the rest, the living being (as it seemes) not able to bury the dead, they were left for the Crowes, Kites and vermin to prey upon. And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations, made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes, that, as I travailed in the forest nere the Massachusetts, it seemed to mee a new found Golgatha.”
Again where are the sixty million??? Those are numbers that are not typically thrown around about native population
Here’s a paper that makes a claim for 54 million.
https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0289.htm
Others make claims as low as 8 million, others say 100+ million.
I don’t see that the exact number is important; the original claim is that most were killed by diseases their immune systems had never seen.
And that is an unknown. It does however fit the white guilt approach to history
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