Americas is dominated by European-descended people today but over 550 years ago the natives numbered in millions before diseases and wars took a heavy toll

The Italian explorer Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in October of 1492 and came across Indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamian island, now called San Salvador. He later wrote in his diary about "great multitudes of men" who greeted him on that day. But within a few decades, the Indigenous people of the Americas were plagued by what has been described the "Great Dying" -- a combination of disease, war, and enslavement -- which caused a rapid fall in the native population, according to a report by Live Science.

A centuries-old quest

For a really long time, researchers have been trying to figure out the number of Indigenous people who lived in the Americas before European colonizers took over the region. But estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological finds, and land carrying capacity have varied enormously.


But recent research into the region's demography revealed that the population peaked a number of centuries before Europeans reached the shores of North America. This means that if the Europeans had arrived at that peak period, the history of the continent may have been vastly different.

People have lived in the Americas for thousands of years, after having entered the continents via the region around the Bering Strait. According to archaeological evidence, these first Americans dispersed throughout the lands quite rapidly.

Early population estimates

Estimates for the number of Indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 -- the year Columbus made landfall -- have ranged from one million to 112 million.

Among the first modern researchers who attempted to put a number on the Indigenous population before Columbus' arrival was the anthropologist Henry Dobyns. In a book released in the early 1980s, Dobyns used estimates of how many people each type of landscape could hold and historical records of 16th-century disease epidemics to reach an Indigenous population estimate of around 112 million people -- over 100 times more than what some previous experts had thought.

But newer archaeological research in the 1970s and the '80s found that the Americas were not uniformly settled, George Milner, an anthropologist at Penn State, told Live Science. Dobyns' estimates were hence rendered unrealistic.

Modern and more realistic research

Around that time, researchers started to focus on creating population estimates for specific regions of the hemisphere, using parameters such as relative density of pottery sherds at a location, number of stone tools and flakes, number and size of houses, and mortality trends from human skeletons.

In a 2019 study, geographers used 129 population estimates from more than 80 published studies to model the hemisphere-wide distribution of the Indigenous population at the time of Columbus' arrival.

For that research, the hemisphere was split into seven regions -- the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Inca territory, Amazonia, North America, and the rest of the Americas. The researchers arrived at a combined estimate of 60.5 million. Their estimate for North America (comprising modern-day United States and Canada) was about 3 million to 6 million.

In a 2010 study, Milner and geographer George Chaplin focused on data from eastern North America, compiling historic group sizes and sizes of archaeological occupation areas to estimate the location and size of population aggregates. On the basis of this method, their overall estimate for the eastern US and southeastern Canada was about 1.6 million people.

'A very different history'

Another research found that the maximum population of North America was about 2.5 million in 1150 and had declined significantly, to roughly 1.8 million in 1492. "Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population," Robert Kelly, an archaeologist at the University of Wyoming, told Live Science. "It could have been a very different history."

Experts told Live Science that the pre-1492 population of what are now Canada and the US was in the range of 2 million and 4 million. The archaeological findings in the region bring hope that a population estimate for the entire Western Hemisphere may be made in the future. Milner has expressed optimism that day will come. "It's time-consuming, laborious and not especially flashy work to do," he told the publication. However, he added that the work is important as it can help help us brace for the future.

"Environmental scientists are really trying to look at what's happened over long periods of time to give us a range of variation of what might happen in the future. We have to make some informed decisions about how to manage our landscape and accommodate these changes," Milner said.