"Them" meaning the Puritans... or, for that matter, any OTHER European transgressor-invader-"conquistador." History clearly shows us "THEY" never gave a flying fuck about ANY indigenous peoples' laws or rights, written or unwritten, your "show me the law" response, notwithstanding.
All that b.c. has said is true. Some scientists now have concluded that about 60 millions of the indigenous peoples lived in the Americas. Why did the population take such a drastic drop? And when did this drastic drop in indigenous people happen.
This article covers the time from 1492 to somewhere in the 1600s. The issue of what European settlers and their descendants, particularly Andrew Jackson did that was horrible to the Native Americans is not covered in this article or this post as this happened much later in time. There is no excuse for the treatment that the European settlers and their descendants treated the Native Americans in the 1700s and 1800s.
This article is about what happened to the people. I found this fascinating because until I read this article, I thought that there weren't more than a few million indigenous people in the Americas in 1492. I was wrong.
European colonization of the Americas killed 10 percent of world population and caused global cooling.
I found this source that has used scientific methods to make its conclusion that there were about 60 million indigenous people living in the Americas in 1492. What happened to them? Most died from European diseases.
"While Europe was in the early days of the Renaissance, there were empires in the Americas sustaining more than 60 million people. But the first European contact in 1492 brought diseases to the Americas which devastated the native population".
This source concludes that diseases from Europe were the primary cause of such a drastic drop in population in the population of the peoples of the Americas from 1492 until the 1600s. 56 million died from four diseases brought to the Americas from Europe.
Several quotes to consider:
"Europeans brought measles, smallpox, influenza and the bubonic plague across the Atlantic, with devastating consequences for the Indigenous populations."
"multiple waves of epidemics hit Indigenous immune systems that had evolved in isolation from Eurasian and African populations for 13,000 years."
For comparison: Consider some studies believe that the bubonic plague by itself had earlier wiped 30 % of the population of Europe.
"People who didn’t die from smallpox, died from the following wave of influenza. Those who survived that succumbed to measles. Warfare, famine and *colonial atrocities did the rest in the Great Dying." (*Our shame.)
"A figure of 90 percent mortality in post-contact America is extraordinary and exceeds similar epidemics,"
To determine the number of people who lived in the Americas in 1492, scientists used the following figures to arrive at 60 million people living in the Americas in 1492:
"about 10 percent of the landmass of the Americas, had been farmed or under another human use when Columbus arrived. ... Europe 23 percent and in China 20 percent of land had been used by humans at the time."
The article does give other statistics and information.
