A group can be a country, or an ethnic group, a religion, etc. And wiped out could be anything like genocide, disease, or natural disaster.
I was thinking about this because we’ve had plenty of genocides in the past which has reduced the numbers of a group of people, but even if millions are killed, millions usually still survive. With disease, the Black Plague wiped out like a quarter of Europe, but there were enough survivors that countries like France or Spain or Italy didn’t just disappear. The only thing I can think of is something like Pompeii, where the city was just covered with ash and lava and ceased to exist. And I think Genghis Khan also once destroyed a whole city by killing or enslaving everyone in it and diverting a river to wipe it off the map.
This is what came to mind to me also. And while not Homo sapiens (or perhaps a sub-species) they should count as “people” I would think, we share 99.5% of their DNA and some (most?) people have Neanderthal genomes in their DNA.
The problem is that not everyone agrees they actually went extinct, there’s a theory that they “vanished” through interbreeding. Which means they’re not gone, they’re us.
The Taino were basically driven to extinction by the arrival of the Spanish. They were reduced from probably millions in the Caribbean to fewer than 500 people. There are some people remaining that have some mixture of Taino background, but as a group they were wiped out in the 16th century.
There are quite a few indigenous groups which were recorded by the first European explorers that no longer exist as identifiable groups. It’s hard to distinguish between “driven to extinction” and “absorbed.” Most of the group may have been killed off, but the survivors might have been enslaved or otherwise incorporated into the dominant group. So they still have descendants, even the group is effectively extinct.
Neanderthals are an example of this. Neanderthals are long extinct as a group, but they still have living descendants, which include a large percentage of modern humans.
I would imagine that the best way to answer the question would be to frame it as something like, “what’s the largest group that people self-identified as in the past for which no one self-identifies as today?” Plenty of people still self-identify as Native Americans, and even of various particular tribes. But certainly there are ones that no one does so for any longer.
I’m sure this will irritate some American Nativists and ethnologists, but many tribes were very small and almost indistinguishable from others in their region. Ishi’s tribe was closely related to others and probably never more than a few hundred members.
California in particular had hundreds of such small tribes who were grouped into far fewer “peoples” or “nations.”
Nothing undoes the loss due to simple extermination, but it’s not going to be one of the larger groups thus eliminated.
This would be a difficult criterion to apply. Nobody today identifies as a Gaul, a Hun, a Hittite, or an Aztec, but they weren’t “wiped out.” (Some people may identify with these groups today, but not as part of a continuous tradition with the original group.) They no longer speak the same language as in the past, or preserve their culture, but they have many modern descendants.
Native Americans include many nations of people … and some of these nations were wiped out completely. My understanding the Nation that lived here where I live are gone, just a few people with 1/8th of the blood amalgamated into one of the surviving Nations.
Near as I can guess, and the restrictions put down by the OP, an entire nationality doesn’t get completely wiped out, somewhere some place there will still be someone of at least partial kinship. The Huns, Visigoths, Britons … are they wiped out or just incorporated into other Nations?
The great flood killed everyone on earth except Noah and his family. Bible scholars don’t really know the numbers but it is estimated to have been well over a million.
