american-holocaust

268 APPENDIX Ibest estimate for the region that presently constitutes the United States andCanada. 23Among the reasons for some researchers to have concluded recentlythat all estimates to date have been too low, is the increasingly acknowledgedlikelihood that European diseases, once introduced into the virginsoil environments of the Americas, often raced ahead of their foreign carriersand spread disastrously into native population centers long before theEuropean explorers and settlers themselves arrived. In other instances, someEuropeans may have been on the scene when the initial epidemics occurred,but these people generally were soldiers more interested in conquestthan in studying those they were killing. New archaeological studiesin particular locales have demonstrated that this previously "invisible"population loss may have been widespread-a phenomenon that also isnow being uncovered among post-European contact indigenus peoples asfar away from the Americas as New Zealand, the Pacific islands of Fiji,and Hawai'i. 24 If this did indeed happen on a large scale throughout theAmericas, as Dobyns and others now contend that it did, even the higherrange of current hemispheric population estimates may be too low. This isbecause the historical consequence of such archaeological research findingsis the discovery that time and again the first European observers and recordersin an area arrived only well after it was totally bereft of its longestablishedhuman inhabitants, or at the very least that such observers andrecorders found-and incorrectly took to be the norm prior to their arrival-onlyresidual populations so small and demoralized that they providedno hint of true previous population magnitude or cultural vitality. 25Even if certain plagues, such as smallpox, did not always precede theappearance of the European disease carriers themselves into certain regions,however, those who still disagree with Dobyns and his supporterson this point acknowledge that population loss among native societies routinelyreached and exceeded 95 percent-a rate of decline more than sufficientto account for a pre-Columbian hemispheric population in theneighborhood of 100,000,000 and more. 26 Comparative research in SouthAmerica and Hawai'i has shown, moreover, that cultural and biologicaloutgrowths of military assault and epidemic disease, such as severe psychologicaldisorientation and high levels of pathogen- and stress-inducedinfertility, can by themselves be primary agents in population losses ofnear-extermination magnitude. 27 In sum, while debate continues as to theactual population of the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans at theend of the fifteenth century, few informed scholars any longer contend thatit was not at least within the general range of 75 to 100,000,000 persons,with roughly 8,000,000 to 12,000,000 living north of Mexico-while someof the more outstanding scholars in the field have begun to suspect thatthe true figure was even higher than the highest end of this range.