wiped out upwards of 5 million Europeans
The people that fallowed Columbus may have wipe out more than 100 million Native Americans.
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.
Pure liberal BS - there weren’t no where near 100 million Indians. There is no such thing as Native Americans. I am a native American. I was born in Brooklyn, NYC so that makes me native to this country. Indians came across some land bridge from Asia several thousand years ago. So big deal. The best estimate of people living in what is now called the USA was somewhere between 20-30 million. Maybe, if that. If someone challenges me on my native roots saying my ancestors came from Europe then the same argument goes to those who came here from Asia. There are 125 tribes in the US. None of them claim to be Native Americans. There were none until the Dept. of the Interior started classifying Americans. - the only country in the world to classify their own citizens.