Except when it was.
From the Squanto article I linked;
At last in 1619 Squanto returned to his homeland aboard John Smith’s ship, having joined an exploratory expedition along the New England coast, led by Captain Dermer. He soon discovered that the Patuxet, as well as a majority of coastal New England tribes (mostly Wampanoag and Massachusett), had been killed off the year before by an epidemic plague, possibly smallpox (although it has recently been postulated as having been leptospirosis)
Squanto (edit: rather the article about him) wasn’t speaking about the Americas as a whole.
Except that you guys were walking down the path of saying there was never any mass depopulation and it was all a long slow decline, and I showed otherwise.
Fact is that we’ll never know how many different events it was and how many died in each. Yes, it was never one single event. But there were single events that each knocked the hell out of existing populations all at once.
I think they all went into the West.
I understood that, and was trying to expand on what you said, not contradict it. I am sorry if that wasn’t clear.
No. But the Viking contact was brief and apparently antagonistic. So there wasn’t a lot of chances for mingling.
Likewise the Vikings were at the tail end of a long support line. By the time they got to America (Canada) there had been multiple month long voyages. Most diseases do not have that long an incubation period. And most infectious diseases would have died out before they got to NA.
You “showed otherwise” for a single incident. You can’t just extrapolate that across a couple continents.
By the time Squanto was even a person, European diseases and Native American decline had been occurring for a century.
My mistake. No offense taken or meant.
There is evidence for the largest North American apocalypse: the Chicxulub Crater in Yucatan. It caused megatsunami, global earthquakes, volcanic eruptions worldwide, acid rain, greenhouse effect.
Makes a little plague look puny by comparison.
Just a reminder about our neighbors to the south. They are also North Americans.
You do realise that there weren’t any people around then.
Right? :dubious:
That’s because it was that bad!
Funny. 
This was the meteor, as I’m sure you know, that killed the dinosaurs. And of course plant life.
Perhaps the thread is poorly titled?
Makes sense. If a random 90% of a population died, I would expect serious social, economic, and political upheaval. Social institutions are challenged because coherent families were shattered and you now have a few young orphans, a dozen widows, parents who lost all their children, etc., and the political infrastructure (village councils, chiefly authority, assemblies of elders, keepers of wisdom (i.e. historians and teachers)) collapses from within. The economy no longer works effectively because you now have a random mishmash of people with various skills and resources who can’t dedicate their lives to their niche because they have to fight for survival (e.g. in a hypothetical 21st century apocalypse, there won’t be any major molecular engineering research to find new drugs - the biophysicists will be scrounging trash heaps for food and fuel.
Or, is there evidence that natives of Atlantic Canada fared better in the 1600’s and 1700’s as the French and British came through due to already being exposed to Viking diseases? Remember that the Vikings were not isolated but interacted and intermixed with other European cultures - there were Vikings all over France and the British Isles.
You read my mind.
Couple of quick points – y’all are being conservative when you say 90%; several of the books cited above say 95%. Also, probably the main reason the Viking contact did not produce detectable epidemic infection lies not with the Vikings, but in the small, scattered populations of the"skraelings." Epidemic disease requires large, dense population in order to survive and spread.
An important part of the modern re-evaluation of the Columbian apocalypse is the assertion that native population in the Americas was much larger, denser, and more settled than we used to think.
Well the title is broad but the OP does have a bunch of flags that the question is more focused on the last 500 years than the previous 65 million.
“…after first contact with Europeans… there was a massive die off of the indigenous population …before colonization started…estimates that up to 90% of the population died.”
Exactly.
Plus, based on the evaluations of the Mound Builder towns, they were reaching 10,000 to 30,000 population - basically cities. Cities rely on a well-tuned supply system, plus a lot of the inhabitants specialize. Suddenly left to fend for themselves, likely they would not have the skills. Even in a small village, 10% survival means vital skills (and culture) are lost. It’s no different than if someone rounded up a bunch of downtown New Yorkers, dumped them on a Arkansas farm, and said “there you go”.
De Soto went through in the 1540’s; so the Mississippi basin was likely heavily depopulated 200 years before Boone and Crocket started nosing around over the mountains, bringing additional diseases.
Okay, I’m covered with scratches from burying a live chicken. Happy now?
Where’s that peroxide?
You now must dig it up and burn it, petrol not lighter fluid.
Capt Kirk
I really enjoyed 1491 and highly recommend it, though I can’t speak to its scholarly accuracy.
According to that book, there have long been scholars in the “high population” and “low population” camps for the Americas. However, the numbers that were considered high in 1950 are lower than the numbers that are considered low today (numbers for the pre-Columbian American population, which is the more difficult number to document).
That’s about the whole world, not just what happened in the Americas. It does spend a good bit of time on this population reduction, though (and yes, it’s that which offered the title). It seemed to be consistent with 1491. Definitely a good read.