You have been provided a number of citations to contempraneous estimates of population dating to periods when the deaths occurred and have provided nothing to indicate that those citations are in error.
We have contemporaneous accounts of plagues and diseases wiping out very large numbers of people along the Eastern coast of North America at the turn of the seventeenth century.
We have similar accounts from Mexico.
We have detailed accounts of the peoples among whom DeSoto travelled in what is now the Southeast United States with archaeological evidence of their cities along with evidence that most of them were depopulated at about that time with no warfare to account for that population loss and no further contact with Europeans with whom to intermarry for over a century following his journey.
You have nothing but a single non-scientific bibliographer and a handful of irrelevant insults. You have now gone on to make several absurd statements regarding the actions and purposes of science.
You really might want to make some effort to participate in this thread on the level of someone interested in actual discussion rather than engaging in rather pointless mockery of a topic regarding which you have displayed no serious knowledge.
I already cited my sources. And I already have said why I believe in the “minimalists”. Simply because those figures make sense in my country, at least.
So, how many hundred of millions do you believe lived in the Americas?
Umm… no, you really haven’t. You name dropped three names (Kroeber, Rosenblat and Steward). You provided a list a numbers with no cite for where they came from. And you provided a link to a related wiki page in a language virtually none of the other debaters in this thread speak. That is not a cite. Cites like that would get you a failing grade on any paper in any school I’ve ever heard of. Who are Kroeber, Rosenblat and Steward? What are their works that you are citing? Books? Journal Articles? Websites? Where is the relevant information located, page numbers etc? Now I can guess who you are talking about (Alfred Kroeber, Julian Steward, Angel Rosenblat) but I can’t tell that from your “cite.” If I wanted to I could probably do your research for you and identify where these numbers are from and how they were derived. But I’m not going to. As the debater on the side of the minimalists, it is your responsibility to argue your side.
Likewise you have provided absolutely no evidence on why we should accept your favored experts conclusions over say Henry Dobyns’ 112 million figure. All you have offered is ad hominem attacks on the scholars you disagree with. Hell, you haven’t even made particularly good ad hominems. You even invoked the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. After all Borah is (in your words) an idiot by definition. The fact that he was a professor of Latin American studies at Berkeley, is simply proof that Berkeley has a terrible Latin American studies program to you. (As an aside, Berkeley has a reputation as one of, if not the best Latin American studies programs in both the US and the Americas as a whole).
You have stated your opinion many times. It would be nice if you were to provide any evidence… at all. But at this point, I think it is obvious that you are never going to do so. Nor are you going to respond seriously to attempts to debate with you. So you go ahead and continue to make your jokes and your roll eyes smileys at scholars that disagree with your obviously deeply held opinions.
Fellow, Rosenblat is a respected schollar. He made the statistics for the 500 years celebration of 1992. He studied the whole Latin American region, so why to doubt about him, and other experts that reache his same conclusions?
It was only in the recent years that some scientists looking for glory have began to make those huge figures, so how come one couldn’t suspect about them, and theirs motivations?
After all, science is full of hoaxes and wild theories that were justified by data modified to fit the model.
We don;t doubt him, we doubt you. We have no evidence that he ever proposed any such numbers. You may be making it up or, more likely, you are misrepresenting him as you have misrepresented so many other sources. You don’t exactly have a stellar reputation in this regard.
Wrong.
No, the real question that needs to be answered is why you question them. We have asked this multiple times and you have refused to answer in any rational manner.
OK. I see the point now. I put the citation of Rosenblat numbers together with the post above. His figures were also shown in the “Almanaque Mundial 1992”, so I know they are the same.
10-20 million is a figure that makes a lot of sense, although populations could be a bit above or below. They make sense because they fit the descriptions of the chronicles of the time.
He is. But so are all of his academic dissenters, who are legion. Rosenblatt represents the most extreme of the minimalists and his methods have been heavily criticized, even as he criticized others. Here’s one. Here’s another essay that shows just how extreme Rosenblatt’s thesis was - even other minimalists came to sharply different conclusions on the level of demographic collapse.
By the way you called Borah an “idiot”, but the impression I get reading this is that Rosenblatt and Borah had a collegial relationship - I doubt Rosenblatt would have agreed with your dismissive assesment.
Anyways. I am sorry to have called those scientists “idiots”. I believe they are wrong, and the big crime they commited is because an excess of enthusiasm…
Anyways. My only point is that nobody knows the actual figure as yet. Yes, one can say that the population of the Americas varied from 5 millions to 150 millions, but that is a range too wide to be considered seriously.
We’re talking about your poor grasp of what constitutes “proof” in science. You seem to be laboring under the misapprehension that using “statistics” and “number-crunching” to support a hypothesis is somehow inherently unreliable. But, in fact, even in a “hard” science like physics, there is NEVER any proof. There are merely numbers and statistics that allow us to make assertions with greater (or lesser) confidence.
Who were you talking to about what you weren’t talking about?
I was pointing out that you have contributed some nice logical fallacies, which serve to undermine your argument. Other posters have noted the lack of real data or citations, as well as your lack of understanding of how science works.
Science is based on models of the reality, and those models have to stand experiments. If a model fails, it is replaced.
Now, for historical populations those models also exist. The problem there is how well they are done. When dogmas replace hard work you can get to fantasious conclusions. 120 millions at 1492 anyone?
I see. You attack me, instead of recognizing there are many “scientists” who throw dices to guess the population of the Americas at contact.
And then they publish and repeat theirs dogmas again and again like parrots.
A variation from between 5 to 200 millions is too much a difference to take that field of scholarship seriously. Just imagine that astronomers said that the Moon was between 10.000 km and 400.000 km from planet Earth. What kind of astronomers would be them? :rolleyes:
I see. You attack me, instead of recognizing there are many “scientists” who throw dices to guess the population of the Americas at contact.
And then they publish and repeat theirs dogmas again and again like parrots.
A variation from between 5 to 200 millions is too much a difference to take that field of scholarship seriously. Just imagine that astronomers said that the Moon was between 10.000 km and 400.000 km from planet Earth. What kind of astronomers would be them? :rolleyes:
Even more, if you try to count how many Natives survived by intermarriage in the United States… Nobody has idea. There is no idea either about the percentage of native mtDNA in the American population!! :dubious:
I think a reasonable person would be trying to figure out why the estimates vary so widely, rather than assuming it’s conspiracy or incompetence.
I’m personally more interested in why you have a bee in your bonnet about this issue, since you seem more wrought up about it than seems reasonable for a scientific controversy-lite. For example, there were significant discrepancies regarding the age of the universe, yet no one was starting threads about how astrophysicists are idiots. Well, no scientist was, they were just trying to find better data and do experiments.
Only people with an axe to grind got worked up about it.
Two other things -
I didn’t attack you, I pointed out logical fallacies in your argument. These don’t help you make your point. If I were to attack you, I’d do it in the pit.
You’ve got 5 minutes after you post to change things using the edit button at the bottom of the post. It disappears after 5 minutes.
Again, you mention “logical fallacies”. There aren’t any and that’s the attack. You mention “fallacies” and don’t point to what. That is a tactic of lawyers, actually.
I have the right to ask from where scientists got his conclusions. That’s all.
No, you still aren’t seeing the point. A cite is used to support your argument. So what is your argument? Please correct me if I am wrong, but It appears that this is your argument:
A good cite would be a cite that would help convince us that “10-20 million is a figure that makes a lot of sense.”
A good cite would be more than a list of numbers.
A good cite would show the methodology that folks like Rosenblat used to derive their numbers.
A good cite would help you argue why their methodology is superior to the high-counters methodologies.
A good cite would be in English, because you are trying to convince an English speaking audience.
A good cite would be easily identifiable. Which Spanish language world almanac are you citing? There was more than one published in 1992.
Here is an example of what a good cite looks like. It was originally posted by Tamerlane. In the cited paper William Denevan makes an argument that there were at least 5 million indigenous inhabitants of Greater Amazonia in 1492. He uses previous research, including over 70 cites in his 13 page paper. He examines historical Spanish records. He looks at archeological evidence. He makes population density comparisons to Borneo. He individually looks at the three major land/vegetation types (floodplain, upland forest, and savannas) and makes separate calculations for each.
Now if you are serious about debating this, you should provide a similar cite which would argue against the Denevan cite above. If you want to convince us that Rosenblat’s number of 2 million in the South American lowlands is a more believable number than Denevan’s number of at least 5 million in Greater Amazonia, your cite should include things like contemporary Spanish witnesses, archeology, comparative land use, and any other relevant points or arguments.
Ineffectual arguments against this cite would include ad hominem attacks on Denevan or myself, appeals to Rosenblat’s authority, ignoring the cite, or stating your thesis as a conclusion.
I’ve said this before… and I’ll say it again. I am willing to listen to a serious argument on this topic. I tend to think the 60-80 million people range is the likely pre-columbian population of the Americas. But I could certainly be convinced otherwise. In fact I am very interested in hearing your argument. However you need to actually present an argument with supporting evidence if you are going to try and convince anyone of your position. If you aren’t willing or able to present any evidence then please just stop posting and wasting all our time.
