Re: New world populations

John McCarthy (jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU)
25 Dec 1994 22:36:10 GMT

Dan Moerman includes:

Regarding precolumbian populations, my reading of the
various estimates suggests that whatever figure
investigators select as the "original" value for 1492, they
seem almost always to select a nadir figure of about 5% of
it. Dobyns, for example, says roughly 10 million north of
the Rio Grande in 1492 and 500000 in about 1930. Most
others seem to have the same proportion of decline.

Haven't American Indians within the (expanding) boundaries of the
U.S. been counted in the censuses every ten years since 1790?

-- 
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.