“Nomads need about 50 sq miles per person. So, in North America, probably no more than 20 million. That’s still pretty crowded by nomadic standards, so it can’t be more than that under the best conditions. Even if you account that some natives did have urbanization.”
I’ve heard 2 to 3 million. Roughly the amount that our country could sustain had the Russians retaliated for the Neocons shooting missiles into their country.
I heard that the native population of the entire new world went from 120 million to 6 million between 1492 and 1700.
The main factor was diseases that Europeans had become tolerant to after 10,000 years of trading the diseases back and forth with domesticated animals, vermin and bugs. The natives had not been living in such conditions and thus had no tolerance to the diseases and were wiped out in one fell swoop.
Another factor in the natives intolerance to disease is that since they didn’t have horses, prior to contact with the old world no disease could travel faster than a sick man on foot. This would mean that outbreaks of disease would most often burn themselves out in one community and not spread to others. In Europe after the domestication of horses, disease could travel as fast as a sick man riding a horse. This allowed diseases to jump from town to town and spread over entire regions.
When you are living in such primitive conditions as the natives were, the disease itself doesn’t necessarily have to kill everyone to decimate the population. For a family of 10 natives living a day to day hunter gatherer lifestyle, even if only the father succumbs to the disease, the disease in effect kills 10 people.