Moderating
This being General Questions, we’re interested in fact-based responses, not religious ones.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Again, it depends on your criteria. The city of Carthage was certainly destroyed in 146 BC, more comprehensively than most other cities have ever been (although it was later rebuilt as a Roman city). The territory of Carthage, in North Africa and elsewhere, was absorbed into the Roman Empire. Carthage disappeared as an independent political entity. In that sense, Carthage was certainly destroyed, just as Cato the Elder famously wanted.
But that doesn’t mean that the culture, language and ethnicity were wiped off the face of the earth at that point. For starters, tens of thousands of survivors of the destruction of Carthage were sold into slavery. They would have had descendants. Furthermore, and more importantly, there were many other Punic cities in former Carthaginian territory, scattered across North Africa, Spain and various islands of the Mediterranean. These were simply taken over by Rome.
Plenty of later Romans, including some prominent ones, were of Punic descent. Certainly lots of the inhabitants of Roman North Africa would have been, The Punic language (a variant of Phoenician) survived for centuries. The Emperor Septimius Severus was from North Africa, and apparently spoke Latin with a Punic accent. (I heard someone suggest that this means that he would have pronounced his name “Sheptimius Sheverus”. I always imagine him sounding like Sean Connery. ;))
Pompeii isn’t a great example, either. The city was buried in ash, but most of the inhabitants got away. I’ve seen some estimates claim that as many as 90% of the population of around 20,000 escaped. Others are less optimistic, but we do know that a lot of people survived and escaped to safety.
↑ ↑ ↑ For truth… :eek:
I’d argue this counts as being completely wiped out and no they haven’t really rebounded. Their entire culture was destroyed, their language is now unknown. The only people with descent from Tasmanian Aboriginals are descendants of women who had children with white men, probably rape in many cases. Those children were then raised by white families and taught to be ashamed of their aboriginal descent.
As far as I know its as close as we’ve ever come to complete genocide of a people. For the record there were thought to have been around 15,000 Aboriginals in Tasmania prior to european colonization.
I’d also nominate the native peoples of the Caribbean; the Arawak / Taino.
Genocide of the population plus culture, language etc gone.
While many Puerto Ricans have Taino ancestry, if that is sufficient to say the Taino haven’t been wiped out then probably no group has ever been wiped out.
Since this is GQ, can we have references for these claims?
Well, certainly the restriction of Tasmanian (Palawa) ancestry nowadays to descendants of Palawa women and European men is attested. The unmixed Palawa were wiped out, and the survivors obviously had European fathers/Palawa mothers instead of the other way around.
As for the relationships between those European fathers and Palawa mothers, contemporary evidence confirms that at least some of them must have been nonconsensual:
But others equally certainly were consensual, such as the decades-long marriage of the “last Tasmanian” or last confirmed full-blood Palawa, Fanny Cochrane, with the English ex-convict William Smith. (By the way, the reason Fanny Cochrane Smith, a full-blooded Palawa, is known only by an English name is because English officials involved with Aboriginal relocation insisted on using only English names for the Palawa people. So the cultural-suppression bit is real, too.)
The Beothuk people: native to the island of Newfoundland. No known lines of descent from any of them exist today (though it’s hard to believe they could possibly have been completely isolated). Probably the closest you can get. There’s going to be no group larger than a few people that didn’t have a brother or a cousin travel to the neighboring tribe.
I should probably have specified people as in modern humans, so after the Neanderthals went extinct. The purpose of this is to see if humans, nature, or disease has caused the single greatest destruction of one group of people.
How many people were there when it was wiped out?
I looked up the wiki for Arawak but it didn’t say how many there were at their peak. Plus, they seemed to have gradually declined through no single event from outsiders or nature.
There seems to have only been up to 500 to 700 of them?
I saw what you did there :smack: :eek: 
ex-Rolling Stones fan here. I gave up on 'em post-Satifaction.
While they survived genetically, I really think you have to include most North American natives as “wiped out.” In a little less than 200 years, they went from nations considered equal (or superior) for treaty rights and in warfare, with large and complex societies and government, to little more than displaced persons. Even most Nativists will admit that the nations and rituals and gatherings today are shadows of a lost reality. Their whole world was destroyed by 1880-1900 and except for a few very small self-isolates, nothing of their former world and glory still exists.
If the interpretation of the OP is “wiped out, gone, all dead” - never mind. But in the slightly larger interpretation, I’d say Native Americans qualify.
It’s also very difficult to estimate how many Native Americans there were before European contact, as small pox seemed to have been transmitted almost immediately. How many NA’s died before Europeans even tried to settled the New World?
I agree. Pretty well, as a people, as a culture, they were wiped out.
Yes…Taino (or other) extinction by plague is a genocide–in its broadest sense now–just as manslaughter is a homocide, not necessarily aggravated manslaughter or murder.
However, I believe “genocide” the word was coined to cover the last case only.
“How x is x” ethnically is hard enough at any time, and all the harder if complicated by the “how many x were there?” proviso in OP.
I spent a long time in the Canary Islands, where, to consider in the thread, the echo of the vanquished Guanches (Guanches - Wikipedia) is quite loud.
Not by any normal definition of genocide. You can’t just use an analogy with homicide.
Merriam-Webster:
Bolding mine.
The OP makes a distinction between genocide, disease, or natural disaster.
German and Polish Jewish culture. Destroyed in about 5 years.
The largest one is easily the Holocaust; 6 million of the 9 million European Jews (and 18 million Jews worldwide) were deliberately murdered.
The fastest one, which would’ve been the largest at its rate was the Rwandan Genocide; a million people in a hundred days.
Wouldn’t it be all the various peoples or tribes that presumably died during the population bottle neck ~70k years ago when the human population dwindled to a few thousand and we nearly went extinct? Obviously this was due to some environmental stress rather than deliberate genocide, but I’d say that would have been the largest group of (various) peopleS wiped out, since we as a species never went extinct and basically all groups but a small handful were wiped out. No?
Well, there actually was a “great flood” of sorts. However, it would be one that does not depend on the biblical text. Over a period of 10,000 years or so following the last glacial maximum, the sea level rose in fits and starts some 130 meters or so (there are several studies with varying estimates of both the timing and the height). Due to it’s shallow depth, the Ur-Schatt river valley (a.k.a. today’s Persian Gulf) was actually one of the later areas to flood. During the last glacial maximum the valley was well above sea level. Although, even this inundation took several thousand years to be complete. Additionally, as the glaciers melted, there were periodic catastrophic failures of ice dams holding back huge glacial lakes which could possibly have killed large numbers of people. It also seems apparent Asians migrated to North America during this period of environmental turbulence…perhaps due to catastrophic flooding? Vast stretches of land were submerged so there would be no way to determine a death toll, unfortunately. There’s also the apparent human population bottleneck which is often attributed to the supervolcanic eruption of Toba 75,000-years-ago. No data on a death toll would be possible there either, I’m afraid.