What was the population of the new world when the Europeans came in contact?

Question

What was the population of the new world when the Europeans came in contact?

Answer 1

I don't think anyone conducted a census then...besides, there were so many tribes of Native Americans, and none of them kept any records of their population, only generalities like "as many as the leaves on the trees".

Answer 2

20th century estimates have ranged from 1 to 2 million to in the billions, especially when you include South America, which is, of course, also part of the New World. No one really knows for sure. What is more significant than real numbers is the fact that the European conquerors perceived that this was a "vast, virgin, sparsely populated land," which it was not. Because the natives lived within the land and nature rather than in the European style of plowing things down and creating large population masses, the Europeans considered the land to be uncivilized. And what is MOST significant is the fact that European contact immediately desimated the native population, due to diseases unheard of in the New World, especially small pox. In many areas, native numbers were cut by half and more. Natives suffered from few diseases because they bathed regularly, unlike their smelly conquerors who bathed occasionally, they lived out of doors where germs were not concentrated, as they are indoors, and they had vast supplies of clean water, unlike Europe where sewage was dumped directly into the waterways.

Historians today wonder if Europeans would have so easily conquered and destroyed native cultures if their numbers were not so decimated at the very beginning by European diseases. And don't think we didn't use it to our advantage. The first documented use of germ warfare came with the wars in the near and then far west, where soldiers provided natives with blankets infested with Small Pox.

Answer 3

One would imagine these numbers could be derived by only a guess as to the population of indigenous people here already, and I doubt they kept these records. As far as the "new-comers", this would probably be best derived by manifest lists from the ships bringing them here, and the accuracy through the whereabouts of these manifests are probably as reliable in their finding as the strewn-about count of peoples that were here already, as aforementioned. The guess of your figure, for answer, would be pretty close to just that, a close guess.