Several people have asked me about the new study on ancient DNA in the Caribbean, A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean. There is a lot to this paper, some of which is outside of my purview (e.g., I don’t know anything about the archaeology of this region so can’t interpret the genetic results well). One of the major things they did was establish patterns of relatedness. This seems like a major step forward in terms of future applicability to ancient DNA.
But the biggest thing that jumped out at me had to do with effective population size. Carl Zimmer’s write-up highlights this issue:
The genetic variations also allowed Dr. Reich and his colleague to estimate the size of the Caribbean society before European contact. Christopher Columbus’s brother Bartholomew sent letters back to Spain putting the figure in the millions. The DNA suggests that was an exaggeration: the genetic variations imply that the total population was as low as the tens of thousands.
This matters because it starts to change our sense of revisionism (now orthodox?) in books such as 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. To reconcile the small numbers of indigenous people by the 16th century in the Caribbean the hypothesis that there were mass die-offs due to disease, or, the Spanish were inordinately cruel (“The Black Legend”). These results suggest that the scale of the pandemic shock was less of an issue since the baseline number of native peoples is lower in the area.
What does this imply for the rest of the New World? I don’t know. But perhaps the huge census sizes argued for by some scholars won’t hold? It probably depends on the region. But with enough ancient DNA, the same sort of analyses could be replicated.
Seems closest to Miguel de Pasamonte’s 1508 (probably out of date) estimate of 60,000. The first accurate census estimate of the Native population of Hispaniola is from 1510 (33,528), after Diego Columbus arrived on the island; it’s known to have been higher before that, but it’s not entirely clear by how much.
I read: “Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico” by Hugh Thomas https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Cortes-Montezuma-Fall-Mexico/dp/0671511041 a couple of years ago. In my estimation Thomas is an excellent historian whose research and familiarity with the Archives of the Indies in Spain makes the book quite worthwhile.
Thomas has a 5 page Appendix on the pre-Conquest population of Mexico. And a long note on the pre-contact population of Hispaniola.
I read both of Mann’s books. And I have done a lot of reading on the lost civilizations of the New World.
My own conclusion is that we cannot do better than to think in orders of magnitude (log10 Pop) The 7th order is between 3,162,278 and 31,622,777
The population of Old Mexico was on the 7th order, more likely less than 10 million. The estimate for the better documented late 16th century is 2 or 3 million, i.e. the upper portion of the 6th order.
That was probably a third or a quarter of what it had been before the Conquest.
As for the Caribbean, Thomas estimates the population of Hispaniola at 100,000 in 1492 which dropped to ~30,000. Here are the areas of the islands:
Island km^2 % Grand Total
Cuba 105,806 45%
Hispaniola 76,479 32%
Jamaica 11,188 5%
Puerto Rico 8,896 4%
Trinidad 4,827 2%
Grand Total 236,778
The rest of them are less than 2% each.
The table laid out nicely when I typed it in, but the page collapsed it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Caribbean_islands_by_area
Maybe the whole set of Islands had 300,000 people, but that would be a top end estimate.
That would almost fit more with some diseases. The Plague, for example, was basically death if you got it – the survival rate in the Black Death was something like 2% if you got infected. But the actual death rate was around 30-40% (possibly higher – the estimates go up as we get better data), just from a huge percentage of the population simply not getting the disease.
You’d think it be the same with the indigenous population of the Americas, which was mostly rural even in the densest populated parts of the continents.
Left my comments on the last Open Thread of course (https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2020/12/20/open-thread-12-20-2020/#comment-22938) and not much more to say but I really do hope we see more replication of this in a set of archaeological contexts where there is a lot more of a thick set of archaeological data around large scale populations, and that can cross test. Or where we can recalibrate our expectations around what certain kinds of archaeological evidence really mean to tell us about population size and density (are they overestimated, about right, underestimated?).
One further thought is relatives at separated sites reminds me of “A dynastic elite in monumental Neolithic society” (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2378-6) where that was interpreted in light of an elite phenomenon. (And I suspect that this is at least partly in mind for authors as well, since they know “the literature” at least as well as I do and this was an impactful paper). A stronger population size estimate to supplement that paper too would help to put in place the balance of interpretation of how much this was related to non-equally distributed practice within a larger population correlated with different marriage patterns in that populations, vs simply having a smaller population. (How elite / differentiated was this group, vs how much they were simply within a relatively small population? On a sliding scale.)
(That paper’s supplement has a section on “Estimations of Population Size, Inbreeding and Kinship”, but I can’t see anything directly like “We estimate the census size to be X”. Does include : We observe that despite the large samples taken from both Parknabinnia (n=11) and Poulnabron (n=13), only several kin pairings were found… These results imply the sites were not used solely by close kin groups … these findings, together with estimated inbreeding coefficients, suggest a large community was availing of the site from the very outset of its construction”. That’s a bit soft though, not so much like a definite on thousands of people, hundreds, etc.).
@Walter
Any estimates on how big the pre-Colombian population of the US and Canada might have been?
Does effective population size calculation assume some long term equilibrium?
If so it might go badly wrong in some South American agriculturalist Empire that had grown recently out of much sparser pre-agricultural tribes.
@Mick: I have never seen a well documented estimate of the pre contact population north of the Rio Grande. My USWAG would be 6th OM (1 to 2 million). The only hard number I know of is the US 1890 Census which counted ~250K Indians.
The populations of Mexico (Aztec Empire), Maya States, and Inka Empire, were probably each of the 7th OM. But their total probably did not reach 8th OM. They were genuine civilizations with some sizable cities such as Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and Cusco each of which were probably low 5th OM.
Adding the rest of South, Central, and North Americas, including the adjacent islands and the islands of the Caribbean, the total was probably high 7th OM or low 8th OM (~30M).
@Mick. I should probably add that I never looked for one. Most of my reading on pre-Columbian America has been about the Maya and the Inka. I have read very little about non civilized North American natives.
@ Walter, there’s also the new archaeological finds in the Amazon bassin they have been digging out in the last 10 years. They may not have been a real civilization, but they were definitely a proto-civilization culture with high numbers of population density.
In North America, there’s the Mississippi culture whose capital was populated in the tens of thousands. Proto-civilization culture, but still much more numerous than hunter-gatherers around them.
On population size of pre-Columbian American civilizations, the limited figures from Ringbauer’s paper from summer 2020 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.31.126912v2) seemed to indicate that the samples from the Andes about 4000-500 YBP (years before present) were in a population with effective population size between 1,400-10,000. (This paper: “Census sizes are unlikely to be more than tenfold larger than effective population sizes”). I think.
It would be cool if they could access and samples from people in the Amazon from the thousand years before Columbus, for comparison.
(see – https://imgur.com/a/rFfmHT7, blue dots on Andean plot)
@Marianne: I do know of the Amazonian finds. I am a bit skeptical because the disease burden is so high there. The Inka had an Amazonian province, but not a large population in it. The reason that they could maintain Cusco and other large cities in the Andes was that mosquitoes don’t live at those altitudes.
The North American settlement is Cahokia in Illinois. See the Wikipedia entry. The population estimates for the peak population are in OM4 (3,162 — 31,623) I would guess smaller than the modal number of 10,000. They just did not have the level of technology that the Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations had. The site was subject to frequent flooding, malaria, and waste disposal problems.
I just can’t get over OM6 for North America.
Razib: I have been rereading the Carl Zimmer article. It is based on two studies one from the Reich Lab:
Fernandes, D.M., Sirak, K.A., Ringbauer, H. et al. A genetic history of the pre-contact Caribbean. Nature (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03053-2
And one from Science:
Genomic insights into the early peopling of the Caribbean
Nägele, K., Posth, C., Orbegozo, M.I., Science 24 Jul 2020:
DOI: 10.1126/science.aba8697
Zimmer wove them together in a way that makes it hard to prise them apart.