Yes, I realized he wrote in Spanish when you said he was Venezuelan and quoted him in Spanish. You obviously speak English and if you’re going to communicate with this board, you need to post in English. Sorry if this means you have to do the extra work of translating any commentary, but if nobody understands you’re cite there is no point in posting it.
I can’t determine that without a link, so in the future you may as well link to his work instead of reposting it.
pinguin left out a key part of the scientific method: disclosure.
Why do you care so much about this issue? What is your vested interest?
Scientific method? Inventing numbers and following PC fashion is what you call scientific method?
Ha!
Show the info, if you have it. Otherwise, don’t troll. :rolleyes:
What more ignorant that propaganda people, dressed as “scientists” that invent figures at random.
Why not?
You’re just about out of chances here, pinguin. Accusations of trolling are not allowed in any part of this site except the BBQ Pit. Debate without insulting people or you will find yourself shown the exit.
I think it would be a shame if Pinguin commits suicide by mod so quickly. It seems to memthat if had put any effort into it, he has a chance of learning something here.
Yeah. He’s contributed to other threads in other forums, too.
Mod, MrDibble suggested I was not aware about the archeological state of art, instead of focussing on the topic
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
In archaeological journals and books.
[/QUOTE]
Ok, now I know I can’t anyone in the forum an idiot, a lier or a troll. It won’t happen again.
However, don’t expect I will accept accusations I am an ignorant, or that I don’t have the skills of reasoning. See the whole thread, please.
All I have said is there is no really any final proof about how many people were in the Americas at contact. Numbers vary from 5 millions to 200. In short, nobody knows.
Even in the somehow easier matter of how many Iroquois there were at contact, there is no agreement. Again, the numbers vary from 15.000 to 100.000 or more. With those ranges, there is no way to assert how much was the impact of contagious diseases, and less to say in a conclusive form if the decline was really sharp, or if it really existed, if it was lead by diseases, hunger, lack of will to survive, murder, intermarriage, assimilation or what.
I did have some more sentences past the one you quoted…
It’s incredibly small. It’s a grand total of four 100 person villages along the fourth largest river in the world. It’s literally walking for weeks to meet someone you aren’t related to. How did they avoid inbreeding? How did they even notice the European colonists? Aliens could have come down and claimed the entirety of Canada and nobody would have ever noticed until the French fur-trappers arrived.
The world of *Mad Max *had a higher population density. It’s likely more people in the US would survive a direct nuclear assault from Russia (at least for a few years) than the entire pre-Columbus population according to that estimate.
Why do you believe Europeans managed to conquer indians lands with relative easy, and without a large scale genocide? My only answer is there were few Indians.
If you knew how many Europeans conquerors and settlers were killed by Indians in South America perhaps you would be amazed. Towns after town burned and devasted! Huge revelions. Thousands of dead in both sizes. Europeans retreating to safer lands! Even more, those rebelions continued for centuries! How could that happened here in South America, and in North America that didn’t happened?
Nope, I am not talking about Indians allied to the French against British and viceversa in European wars in the Americas. I am talking about large Indian armies that couldn’t be stop by the regular European armies!
Why it didn’t happen in North America? Because Indians didn’t have the population to oppose the invasion there. The same happened in the Amazon and Patagonia. In the Amazon, the jungle kept people outside, but in Patagonia there were almost nobody to stop the Europeans!
So is this whole spiel some sort of Native American supremacy schtick? Given all the other supremacists out there I won’t begrudge the Native Americans a few, but if that’s all you’re here to talk about don’t expect much respect or acknowledgement. We’ve seen dog and pony shows like this so many times you’re not going to be able to “sell your wares” at this house.
No, but disclosing any interest in the outcome of the experiment is: So, again, why are you soooooo interested in this? Why does it matter so much?
Again, I don’t think you read other people’s posts very well, and you certainly don’t answer reasonable questions, both of which are rather rude.
ETA: Is it actually a race thing? Good God, what a waste of time.
Supremacy? :eek::eek::eek:
Where did I talked about supremacy? Please point out were I did, or where I said Natives were superior to Europeans, or some Natives superior to others… :smack:
What experiment? I am demanding the sources from where those calculations were made. If someone like Cook claimed something, I would like to know how he got to such conclusions! Not a quote to him, but his sources.
No. It is not a racial thing. Except if you believe Indians were so weak you could kill them by caughing… :rolleyes:
Come one, don’t you guys know that some contagious diseases existed in pre-Columbian times in the Americas?
Look at this paper, for instance
http://revistas.ucm.es/ghi/02116111/articulos/QUCE9090110019A.PDF
Tuberculosis, for instance, existed in preColumbian Americas!
Your understanding of the lethality of disease is so ignorant as to be mind boggling.
Some diseases can take the strong along with the weak, the young with the old, he healthy with the already infirm.
I think the fact that you don’t believe disease can wipe out huge populations is one of the greatest fallacies that has been peddled in this thread, and one of the most easily disproved by almost countless historical and current records.
What’s worse, is you seem to think the claims that huge portions of the Native American population dying to disease is some sort of racist European bred lie that is out to make Native Americans look weak. The very concept of thinking a people weak because they died to disease is ridiculous. Five hundred years ago no country on earth had meaningful medicine, no antibiotics, and no understanding as to how diseases spread. Even in Europe the reaction to epidemics was to pray and engage in various forms of folk medicine Henry VIII for example famously had all kinds of early Renaissance medicinal supplies, all as worthless as dirt at treating or preventing disease. It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, strong, or brave, in the year 1500 if you catch something like the English sweating sickness, the plague, smallpox when you and no one in your family tree 1,000 years back has exposure to it or various other diseases we can easily treat today–chances were you died, period.
You shouldn’t call “ignorant” to a member of this forum. Particularly when I can’t offend you in any way, dear. :rolleyes: So, please calm dowm.
How many Europeans (and Africans, too) died of disease in the Americas? Do you have a clue? I read somewhere that an African in the Caribbean platation lived, in average, four years. I know the conquerors had a very high mortality as well, by violence, hunger and disease. Didn’t you know that sailors died like flies? Just imagine the mortality in the Americas at the time.
Besides, it is well known that tribal peoples in the jungles worldwide had a short life expectancy. Too short for modern standards. And in the Europe of the time people didn’t live much longer either.
But that’s not the point. The point is so simple but keep running away:
How many people lived in the Americas at contact? Nobody knows.
Then, if nobody knows, how come some people say that 30, 40 or 90% of the population died at contact?
If you don’t understand the contradiction there, I can’t help you.
What you absolutely fail or refuse to understand is that this whole thread is pointless. You are basically arguing against one of the biggest strawmen in the history of the forum. There is no major scientific movement that claims they are setting down absolute facts about the population of pre-contact America.
Have you ever actually read any work in which a scientist talks about how they developed an estimate for pre-contact populations? What you won’t find anywhere in a scholarly reviewed work by a respected scientist is “these are the absolute numbers in Hispaniola, in Florida, of the Iroquois” or etc. Archaeologists and other scientists that study these things do not speak that way, only people such as yourself who fail to understand how scientists work understand this.
No one in this thread and certainly no reputable scientist has ever made the claims you are arguing against. In fact, the only person we know for a fact is making factual claims without support is yourself, every time you see evidence you don’t like and say “that is rubbish” or “that is a pseudoscientist” you are in fact doing what you accuse others of–namely you’re labeling something as an untruth without doing anything to actually support that claim.