[Sherman Logan]

Your number is (more or less) accurate, your causation is not.

90%+ of those who died never saw a white man. They were wiped out by Eurasian diseases to which they had no immunity.

Exactly the same die-off in America would have occurred had the native Americans been technologically superior and sailed into the Mediterranean to “discover” Europe.

It was the merging of two disease ecosystems that did the damage. Nobody at the time had a clue what was happening, much less how to stop it.

The only way to prevent it would be for nobody to ever cross the Atlantic, which doesn’t seem a particularly practical strategy.

[mountainlion]

I read the books “1491” and “1493” by Charles Mann which were quite an eye opener. He said the explorer Pizarro brought 600 soldiers and 300 disease ridden pigs through Florida to the Mississippi and spread a plague that killed off millions. The Vikings are not known to have raised this king of disaster because the diseases had not hit Europe yet. I recommend the books.