# Americas: Census at contact myth **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 14, 2011, 12:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309 "2011-04-14T00:45:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 12
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 6:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/221 "2011-04-18T18:56:03Z")
Why I should pay your way? I am not claiming superior knowledge either. I am just showing what I know. For instance, do you know that Easter Island has only 4.000 people today, and that even with that small number is not able to produce food for all its people? Easter Island lives on a continuos supply, or subsidy if you wish, from the mainland. The land can’t support more people. ---
**Author:** ![wmfellows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c2a13f/32.png) [@wmfellows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wmfellows)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/222 "2011-04-18T18:57:10Z")
You probably believe you’re being clever. I’d say that to anyone but yourself this looks like deliberate baiting and blustering, by someone who actually knows pretty much fuck all about the subject but likes getting the reaction. Playing the string and woodwinds… ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/223 "2011-04-18T19:07:05Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > The land can’t support more people. And on what basis do you draw this conclusion? Are you an expert on agriculture, anthropology, food production, demographics, anything? Or are you relying on another source that you’re failing to cite (because it’s only in Spanish?)? Or are you just going with your gut on this one? And … so what if Easter Island has only 4,000 people today? Whatever does that have anything to do with the population of North America in the 15th century? ---
**Author:** ![wmfellows](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/c2a13f/32.png) [@wmfellows](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wmfellows)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 7:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/224 "2011-04-18T19:31:48Z")
Or indeed given soil degradation, etc what does modern carrying capacity say about 14th century Easter Island? Anyway, hard to see this as genuine. ---
**Author:** ![Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Attack\_from\_the\_3rd\_dimension](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/225 "2011-04-18T19:49:53Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > Yes, that’s a good experiment. Easter Island. There is a piece of information you don’t know. Do too. > [@](#): > > At contact perhaps there were 3000, but it is likely the figure is lower. You must remember that contact happened after the ecological disaster of Easter Island, that forced a drastic population decline by hunger, before the Europeans arrived. > > But now the piece you are missing. The most dramatic population decline after contact was because SLAVE RAIDS from Peru. a thousand or more natives were hijacked from the island to never return. Yes, there were some contagious diseases as well, but blaming contagious diseases for the decline is just excusing Peruvians for the crime they comitted on Easter Island. > > In fact, after the raids, the reading of Rongo Rongo tablets was lost forever, among many other cultural things! Slave raids is in my 4th paragraph, “documented slave raids”. You don’t even really read our posts, do you? Well, that was telling. I think this experiment has demonstrated what it set out to. Hey, **Ascenray** , enjoy your trip to Patagonia and Easter Island. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 7:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/226 "2011-04-18T19:54:45Z")
That’s right, **wmfellows** , I forgot the field of geology. I wonder is “historical geology” a separate specialty? Thanks, **Attack** , but I think I’ll pass my tickets on to someone with the qualifications to actually study the topic. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2011, 10:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/227 "2011-04-18T22:40:01Z")
Pinguin, it has now been 48 hours. Any chance that you can provide those references that you promised you would provide within hours? ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/228 "2011-04-19T00:01:09Z")
I don’t see a particular need to focus too much at this point on the citations that **pinguin** will never give us. Instead, since he came here to debate some weird agenda I think it is entirely within the realm of appropriate behavior to specifically destroy this method of debate. Firstly, **pinguin** the entirety of your source of information is your “understanding” and your intuition. You talk about population levels today and at the beginning of the 20th century, and act as though a certain population at the dawn of the 20th century would mandate a given population range some 400 years and more prior to the dawn of the 20th century. That hypothesis is not based on anything in science, period. No mainstream scientist, whether they are low counters or high counters in regard to pre-contact population figures, base the number of people to have been around pre-contact on modern day figures. Modern day figures are entirely unreliable because: 1. There have been mass migrations from Europe to the Americas. 2. There have been documented, undeniable mass deaths in the Americas. Even you concede as much, while you say not many died from disease and that the total number of deaths is far lower than what most people say, you do not deny there was a big die off. Because of such a sudden decrease in population, combined with an influx of immigration over 400 years time, it is essentially not possible to scientifically look at a population c. 1900 and using _only_ the count of people in the year 1900 extrapolate what the count would have been in 1500. In fact, you can’t even point to a city in America in 2010 and extrapolate as to what its population would be with certainty in 2000. This is because there are so many variables that you cannot hope to engage in such backwards-oriented calculation. If I locked 100 humans in a 100 sq. mile area with no hope of their escaping, and within the area no disease existed and all the people were not murderous and were not prone to accidents, I could probably calculate based on some average amount of reproduction how many humans would be in that area 50 years later. Likewise, if I knew those controls 50 years after the fact but did not know how many people I started with, given those strict controls, I could make an estimate as to how many people had started the population 50 years prior. In the real world backwards looking calculations cannot make tons of assumptions about migration, disease, warfare, famine, et al. For that reason we instead need to use archaeology, history, our knowledge of geography, geology, biology, demographics, and a host of other fields all brought together to make valid estimations as to the population. Such a process will result in numbers that are not absolute, and no one who is a serious scientist would ever claim those numbers was absolute. What I do know is that no serious scientist would claim that one’s “intuition and personal knowledge of the area” or “the population 400 years later” can be used as real evidence of anything. It is _totally fucking irrelevant_, period. Science is based on your personal experiences in Chile and a count of people 400 years after the fact, especially when the count 400 years later is the result of mass migrations. Secondly, your continual focus on small regions is pointless. Easter Island is an island, and whatever your conclusions based on the size of that island, you cannot extrapolate them because all of South America and North America is not comparable to Easter Island. In addition, you throw numbers around in a way that is entirely inconsistent with your overall argument, such that it is **plainly obvious** to everyone here that you are either making them up or are so uneducated about the matter you can’t keep things straight whatsoever. You semi-concede that Easter Island may have had a population of 3,000 at contact. However, you do say it was probably lower. You do say that Easter Island had 1,000 natives kidnapped in a slave raid. Let’s assume Easter Island _only_ had 1,000 people at contact (you yourself suggest they had more, unless you are suggesting the raid which resulted in 1,000 persons being enslaved actually constituted the entire population of the island.) Easter Island is 63.1 sq. mi, South America is 6.89 million square miles. So South America as a whole is roughly 109,191 times as large as Easter Island. You point to Easter Island “only” having a population of 1,000 as if that should be indicative of how low the population in the rest of the Americas was. Well, if you actually take that theoretical population of say, 1000 (lower even than you have conceded) and extrapolate it out by simply multiplying Easter Island’s pre-contact population of “1000” (our assumption for this test) by the 109,191 multiplier you get a total population of South America at contact of **109 million**. This shows your logic is horrifically flawed, your ideas about how to come to a conclusion about population size are essentially as wrong as anything has ever been, ever. Let’s assume even that Easter Island was 5 times as populous as the average patch of land in South America at contact. Using what I call the “ **pinguin law** ” for calculation of population, that would still yield a total population for South America at contact of **21 million**. That’s just South America, so we’re not even counting Mexico which is widely acknowledged as having a particularly huge population at the time. Again, I arrive at those numbers using “pinguin’s law” pinguin’s law says that to make a realistic, scientific, valid estimation for an _entire continent’s_ population, all you have to do is take a certain area where history is fairly certain of the population, and then base the estimate for the entire continent on the population density of that area. In this case I’m even saying that I’m making the assumption Easter Island was actually far less populated than even **pinguin** says it was. I’m further stipulating that Easter Island is 5x as populous as the average 63 mile square area of the New World. Even making that assumption (meaning 200 \* 109,191) I come up with 21 million people in South America and 30 million some people in North America. However, I don’t buy into pinguin’s law of population calculation, and in fact it is stupid, invalid, simplistic, based on nothing whatsoever aside from one person’s random ramblings; so I’m not suggesting that those population figures are correct. I am suggesting they are still “far too high” according to **pinguin** himself, so in essence pinguin’s law and pinguin are not in agreement at all. Thirdly, no one needs to go to Chile to read your books. Here are the reasons: 1. Most widely acknowledged research on the New World has been published in English, full stop. This is because English is the dominant language of science, business, and international relations in general. It is also because the best, most acknowledged, most talented, and _most intelligent_ researchers in the field primarily publish in English. **Even when English is not their native language**. Even when it is not published in English originally, it is quickly going to be translated to English. Translation is not something that takes generations to complete, and for any important scientific work it would be done very quickly into several different languages. 1. There are no books you have in Chile that are of any use to us that we could not get anywhere else. Chile does not hold the Great Library at Alexandria, nor even any particularly impressive libraries. Chile is a fine country, and I hope that people are not swayed into thinking Chile’s educational system is entirely decrepit based on the horrible way in which **pinguin** has represented his country here on the SDMB. That being said, the most powerful, most advanced, most educated countries in the world, namely the major nations such as those in the OECD, have access to essentially any resources they could possibly want when it comes to published research. No one is sending people to Chile to read books in your libraries, any scientific study done there will be done there because it can’t be done anywhere else. If you’re wanting to study archaeology in Chile, you can only do it in Chile. If you want to read about pre-contact Americas, the best scholars in that field are not in Chile, even the good scholars in that field from Chile have probably moved to other countries. Even the ones who have not moved to other countries, their works are going to be available either in English or even if _not_ we would still be able to acquire those books here. What all of this is to say is, you are not sitting on some mystic pile of ancient tomes no one else knows about. I don’t care if your tomes _are_ only in Spanish (as I said, it is unlikely that they are), I can bet you any amount of money you’d be comfortable with that with a little bit of work I could procure them right here in the United States. Unfortunately I cannot do that, because you refuse, absolutely refuse, to tell us what your sources are. When pressed you talk about arcane libraries and reference works that are unfortunately only published in Spanish. I hate to break it to you, but this forum has many posters who can speak Spanish and read Spanish other than your self. If you would but _tell us the titles of your books, who wrote them, and the year they were published_ we would be able to procure these books. No one even particularly cares if they are genuinely Spanish-language only books. The fact that you will not even give us the sort of written citations that students were able to give professors long before the internet basically suggests you are just making things up. In 1970 if you wanted to cite something in a paper you were doing for college, and you refused to give a citation because “it’s not written in a language you would understand” and when pressed on it you said “well it’s only in a library in Chile” you would fail that paper. Because even if those two things were true, you could **still** tell us the title, author, and publishing date so that we could look into these works. You won’t even do that, and the fact that you refuse to do so makes it appear that you are making things up out of whole cloth. Fourthly, this is a place where people engage in debate. This is further a place where the community _demands_ that you support factual assertions that you make. We’re at a point in this debate now where we aren’t even terribly interested in your showing us how you’re coming up with your low count numbers, or how you’ve coming up with other things you are presenting as “fact.” We can’t even get to that part of the debate yet. We’re at the point where we actually are demanding proof that the numbers you are **quoting from authority** have actually been written down somewhere, _ever_, and we’re asking you to tell us _where_ so that we can verify. Until you do that, you will look like a liar, period. You say things like “the high count don’t make sense based on the historical records I know.” I don’t even care if you show us _where_ in those records something is being said to support your argument, at this point I’d just like you to tell us _what_ those records are. Can you even do that? If you can do that, I do not think it too much to ask that you dig up _one single quote_ from _one single historical record_ that will significantly help your position here. _One_, just one. Hell, I could probably find one quote from the historical record to support any crazy thing if I wanted to, but you can’t even do that. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/229 "2011-04-19T00:15:30Z")
> [@wmfellows](#): > > Or indeed given soil degradation, etc what does modern carrying capacity say about 14th century Easter Island? Anyway, hard to see this as genuine. You can see the details in Jared Diamond Collapse, and others sources as well. The deforestation of the island, and the extinction of the Easter Island Palm, not only suspended the building of new moais and platforms. It also meant that fishing was greatly diminished. In any case, the island is not self-sustainable today. In fact, as I said before, there is continuous supplying of goods from the continent to the island. Even more, without intervention from outsiders some plants, like the toromiro, would had become extincted. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/230 "2011-04-19T00:23:51Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Let’s assume Easter Island _only_ had 1,000 people at contact (you yourself suggest they had more, unless you are suggesting the raid which resulted in 1,000 persons being enslaved actually constituted the entire population of the island.) > > Easter Island is 63.1 sq. mi, South America is 6.89 million square miles. So South America as a whole is roughly 109,191 times as large as Easter Island. You point to Easter Island “only” having a population of 1,000 as if that should be indicative of how low the population in the rest of the Americas was. Well, if you actually take that theoretical population of say, 1000 (lower even than you have conceded) and extrapolate it out by simply multiplying Easter Island’s pre-contact population of “1000” (our assumption for this test) by the 109,191 multiplier you get a total population of South America at contact of **109 million**. This shows your logic is horrifically flawed, your ideas about how to come to a conclusion about population size are essentially as wrong as anything has ever been, ever. > . This only shows that purposely you aren’t reading what I said, but what **YOU** want to believe I said. Look at the densities of population in the islands around the world. Look, for instance, to the densities of population in the Caribbean and compare to the density in North America and South America **TODAY** You can’t make just a linear extrapolation. Everywhere, the density of population depends on the environment and the technology to exploit it. Islands usually have a huge supply of fish, for instance, something you don’t find inland. Anyways. Believe what you wish. I don’t care about your beliefs, actually. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/231 "2011-04-19T00:26:48Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > You can see the details in Jared Diamond Collapse, and others sources as well. The deforestation of the island, and the extinction of the Easter Island Palm, not only suspended the building of new moais and platforms. It also meant that fishing was greatly diminished. In any case, the island is not self-sustainable today. In fact, as I said before, there is continuous supplying of goods from the continent to the island. Even more, without intervention from outsiders some plants, like the toromiro, would had become extincted. You did not really address **wmfellows** at all, he was asking you about how any current ecological issues at Easter Island had bearing on the 14th century carrying capacity. In fact your argument makes even less sense the more I look it over. First, you point to the fact that Easter Island had a small population at contact as proof that population by and large must have been small, across the board. Second, you say that Easter Island at contact had already been devastated by ecological disaster. This squares with Jared Diamond’s conclusions, that Easter Island is an example of a society that collapsed solely because of environmental concerns. However, you then go on to talk about slave raids and such depopulating the island significantly post-conflict. Since this is mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Jared Diamond’s book you may think that you’re still aligned with Diamond, but you aren’t. Diamond doesn’t acknowledge or address the slave raids at all, and in fact in the Wikipedia article (which I highly suspect is your only significant source of knowledge concerning the book in question) it specifically mentions the slave raids as being a major issue most professional scientists and historians point to as _the_ major cause of depopulation, and not ecological collapse (so in essence the slave raid thing undermines the ecological collapse argument, it doesn’t go hand in hand with it as you are presenting it here.) ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/232 "2011-04-19T00:27:55Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > This only shows that purposely you aren’t reading what I said, but what **YOU** want to believe I said. > > Look at the densities of population in the islands around the world. Look, for instance, to the densities of population in the Caribbean and compare to the density in North America and South America **TODAY** > > You can’t make just a linear extrapolation. Everywhere, the density of population depends on the environment and the technology to exploit it. Islands usually have a huge supply of fish, for instance, something you don’t find inland. > > Anyways. Believe what you wish. I don’t care about your beliefs, actually. I don’t particularly care about yours, either. I do care about all these strange sources you won’t talk about. Could you quote any of them? There’s actually a pending request we have had out with you for over 48 hours now in which we’ve asked for _one single quote_ to support your arguments. Are you ready to concede you cannot find a single quote to support your argument? ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/233 "2011-04-19T00:28:57Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > 1. Most widely acknowledged research on the New World has been published in English, full stop. This is because English is the dominant language of science, business, and international relations in general… Studies heavely influenced by North American politics, and that deserve more serious analysis. If those studies were so great, so perfect, they wouldn’t have so many found by experts like David Henige. And with respect to North American schollars, of course they have lot of resources, but I don’t expect an American studying in its ivory tower, to have the details of what happened here, without consulting local scientists. ---
**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/234 "2011-04-19T00:31:31Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > Studies heavely influenced by North American politics, and that deserve more serious analysis. > > If those studies were so great, so perfect, they wouldn’t have so many found by experts like David Henige. > > And with respect to North American schollars, of course they have lot of resources, but I don’t expect an American studying in its ivory tower, to have the details of what happened here, without consulting local scientists. Could you point to some resources published by local scientists that we could read on these issues, specifically the ones you have read? Just title, author, and date of publication would be enough, I don’t need a link to them in an online format. Along with that information please provide a brief summary of how the book relates to this argument. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/235 "2011-04-19T00:31:49Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > This only shows that purposely you aren’t reading what I said, but what **YOU** want to believe I said. > > Look at the densities of population in the islands around the world. Look, for instance, to the densities of population in the Caribbean and compare to the density in North America and South America **TODAY** > > You can’t make just a linear extrapolation. Everywhere, the density of population depends on the environment and the technology to exploit it. Islands usually have a huge supply of fish, for instance, something you don’t find inland. > > Anyways. Believe what you wish. I don’t care about your beliefs, actually. Hijo mio, sará mejor de admitir la derrota. Tambien hay peces en ríos. (I’m not a native Spanish speaker, but what I attempted to say was “Best admit defeat, my boy. There are fish in rivers, too.”) ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/236 "2011-04-19T00:52:22Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > FWIW Pinguin is doing the same thing over in [this thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=604311). > > **Pinguin** : Read the chronicles of Cabeza de Vaca. He described a world with a very low population density, and lot of problems to survive for lack of food. > > **Blake** : No he didn’t. He said “the country [along the Rio Grande in New Mexico] is incredibly populous”. He said “[on the Gila River New Mexico] we got to the [Opata] people of permanent houses who had plenty of corn.” He said “we marched more than 210 miles through continuously inhabited country of such domiciles, where corn and beans remained plentiful”. Those are not descriptions of a world with a very low population density and lack of food. > > **Pinguin** : I actually read it, and the story is quite pathetic. Wealthy farmers? Gimme a break. > > **Blake** : I just quoted from the book. Now if you would care to quote where he says that a majority of people he encountered in the US were hungry HGs I would appreciate that. > > **Pinguin** : I will find some quotes for you by Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote in my mother tongue. > > **Blake** : Still waiiting > > **Pinguin** : Take it easy. It will take me a month to compile the refference. > > **Martin Hyde** : Maybe you could provide even one quote while you take the month required > > **Pinguin** : Ok. But I’ll have to find the book in my library. It will take me hours!!! Anyways, I’ll do. > > **Blake** : Been 24 hours. Still waiting. > > Anyone seeing a pattern here? Pinguin makes multiple absolute assertions about how low the American population was. When he is shown evidence that flatly contradicts that he suddenly requires a month to address it. Even when the evidence is in references that he introduced. > > In the meantime he has plenty of time to keep posting the same nonsense. OK. The first citation to the descriptions to Cabeza De Vaca is the following: Fuente: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (author) Naufragios y comentarios Edition by Roberto Ferrando, Dastin Historia, 1984, Madrid Spain. Naufragios, Chapter VII. Fragment, about 1 page from the beginning. (I won’t translate. Cabeza De Vaca wrote in Spanish) “Respondienronnos cada uno por si, que el mayor pueblo de aquella region era el Apalache, y que adelante habia menos gente muy mas pobre que ellos, y que la tierra era mal poblada y los moradores de ella muy repartidos, y que yendo adelante, habia grandes llanuras y espesuras de montes y grandes desiertos y despoblados” Solo la primera cita. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/237 "2011-04-19T00:57:04Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > Hijo mio, sará mejor de admitir la derrota. Tambien hay peces en ríos. (I’m not a native Spanish speaker, but what I attempted to say was “Best admit defeat, my boy. There are fish in rivers, too.”) ¿Que derrota? ¿Si la gente en esta cantina tiene menos conocimiento del tema que el que yo tengo? Además, permitame redactarle su sentencia en buena forma: “sera mejor admitir la derrota” (el “de” no se usa"). A la expresion “hay peces en el rio” mi respuesta sería "¿Y a mi, que? No amigo, si usted quiere hablar conmigo en castellano, es mejor que sea castellano. Sino, lo puedo agarrar para el tandeo. De paso, no uso acentos, por incompatibilidades entre teclados ingleses y en español.😃 Cariños. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/238 "2011-04-19T00:59:32Z")
> [@Martin\_Hyde](#): > > Could you point to some resources published by local scientists that we could read on these issues, specifically the ones you have read? Just title, author, and date of publication would be enough, I don’t need a link to them in an online format. > > Along with that information please provide a brief summary of how the book relates to this argument. Of course I can. But don’t expect I answer quickly. My main source of information on Easter Island comes, of course, from the ideas of Jared Diamond, Collapse, and other similar studies. I also have refference books in Spanish, which I could site if you are interested in reading in Spanish. If you want to get into contact with locals, I can do it as well. ---
**Author:** ![pinguin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ac8455/32.png) [@pinguin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pinguin)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 1:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/239 "2011-04-19T01:01:17Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Pinguin, it has now been 48 hours. Any chance that you can provide those references that you promised you would provide within hours? I provided the first quotation two posts above. It is from Naufragios of Cabeza de Vaca. I hope you have read the book. If so, you could recognize where the citation comes from. ---
**Author:** ![MichaelQReilly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df705f/32.png) [@MichaelQReilly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelQReilly)\ **Post date:** [April 19, 2011, 1:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309/240 "2011-04-19T01:08:46Z")
> [@pinguin](#): > > The problem is that history and the calculations of modern scientists don’t match. > Most of the surface of the Americas at pre-contact times was settled by hunter-gatherers, which, certainly, didn’t have a large density of population, particularly in the Americas, which is quite a miserable land if you don’t work it hard. > Now, those estimations that the Andes, for instance, had 30 million people are really baloney. I know the places and the archaelogical sites, at least in my country, and those numbers are ridiculous. I’m sort of on your side in this argument, but you need to check your history here. By the time serious colonization of the mainland happened, in either North or South America, contact with Europeans had already been happening for decades or more. Part of the reason the continent looked so “miserable” is because the diseases had already taken a huge toll on native societies by the time Europeans had contact with them. To cite one instance, by the time the Pilgrims settled in Plymouth, the local natives had just recently suffered through a horrific epidemic. These societies had no resistance to European disease. We are talking Black Plague death rates year after year. We know this happened because it _continued_ to happen after the Europeans arrived. You barely have to turn the page in any primary source from the period to hear its author talk about the horrible epidemics the natives suffered. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309.md?page=11) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/americas-census-at-contact-myth/578309.md?page=13)