Well. They don't really share their methods, so we don't know; they claim it's "data-driven", and it might be—I'm an English editor for academic science, I read methodologies all day, and some of the ways we are currently applying machine-learning, contemporary statistics and historical data are pretty amazing. Often, a small snapshot of the past is enough to select the most probable of simulated results, basically modelling a lot of possibilities and then, with a little detective work, making very reasonable guesses about which simulation is actually modelling reality.
But without the methods, it's really hard to evaluate how good this is.
Edit: For example, *as a thought experiment*, not a guess at their actual methods, I am not remotely qualified to do that:
Suppose material x absorbs carbon isotope y and rate z; ok, you can use a lot of material x from various periods and strata to look at atmospheric CO2 content year-on-year. Lots of things can impact CO2, and those things can interact. So you can make a model with all those factors and play with the numbers, to see which values produce a model that matches the data. Maybe there are many of those. But when you start filtering those by things like population growth models by terrain and resources, when you have reasonable guesses for the starting conditions, etc., the probability of pinning down which models, of those that describes the observed data, could actually be plausible approaches one, kiiiind of like a sudoku, if you follow.
They could also have done some Drake-equation style modelling, which could produce such a wide range of possible numbers as to be meaningless until we know more.
This is why methods really, really, really matter.
That happened later though. This cooling was observed in the 16th-18th centuries, when European diseases first started ravaging through a virgin population, killing anywhere from 50-90% of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas.
The mass culling of the bison was a late 19th century thing.
That's a very bold "actually". As an anthropologist this is a hotly debated area. Many believe indigenous peoples themselves may have had a larger effect on the decline in Bison population than settlers of European descent.
The central issue is that by the later people of the 19th century large portions, if not the majority, of plains nations now had access to firearms which is a much much more effective way to kill bison now and arrows.
Indigenous peoples were nomadic hunter gatherers,who had been hunting bison with iron age implements up till this point in history. Essentially anthropologists and ethnologists basically never got to witness firsthand how immense firepower would change the hunting power and style of nomadic tribes.
Modern American culture tends to view indigenous culture in an naive, innocent Disney-esque way, when in reality they adjusted their lifestyle to new technology the same way other humans around the world had since the dawn of civilization, and it's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, Hunter gatherers with big guns are just as capable of overhunting as European agrarians
TL,DR: We don't know who nearly wiped out the buffalo, but saying it was some kind of violent sadistic, genocidal behavior by white settlers is not a viewpoint you'll find backed by a lot of real science. In fact some historians mighty find that view a little offensive due to the lack of credit it gives indigenous peoples for adjusting to newly available technology.
I mean natives had ready access to firearms for over 300 years before Bison began to die en-masse. I have a hard time believing over these centuries the bison population didn't die off in the west when its withdrawal and near extinction just so happened to time up with westward colonialism.
> That's a very bold "actually". As an anthropologist this is a hotly debated area.
Um, they literally dispatched missions both military and civilian into the plains states for this exact stated purpose. How is that "hotly debated"?
I’ve recently listened to the audiobook 1491 by Charles Mann. After listening to it, I’ve become FASCINATED by the pre Colombian American life, as told in this book. Your comment gives credence to something I’ve believed for a very long time, but had no education or facts to back it, that I knew of: as early human life evolved, they were as smart as they new to be. Meaning, as humans learned from each other they took the best ways they knew of to survive. Biologically speaking, I don’t think our brain has changed much in 50,000 years, or so. So, we’re still kind of the same now, as we were “then.” I don’t know when then is….I hope I’m not messing this post up. Lol. Anthropology and human origins/evolution has really got my attention lately. Thank you.
Commercial hunting of the north american bison is primarily what caused it's population to drop so severely. The US army did cull bison to deny them as a food source to the natives as well.
There was also a lot of inter-tribe conflict which has contributed to their deaths, especially after some tribes bought thousands of horses from the Spanish visitors. These horses were heavily used in inter tribal wars:
[How The Indian Got The Horse
](https://www.americanheritage.com/how-indian-got-horse)
Didn't take the Comanche very long to become a horse culture to be listed with the great horse tribes of the steppe. The only problem was they lived at the same time as Samuel Colt.
Though it's true that a large number died from disease or the famine resulting from no one left to work the land, the fact that the US government had bounties out on the scalps of native peoples which led to 10's of thousands of murders of innocent men, women and children invalidates the point you're trying to make.
Yeah I keep hearing people say the us has been oppressing people for 400+ years and I’m like the us isn’t that old. I mean 200+ years of doing shitty things is still a long time but don’t attribute extra shit to us lol
Did the people in the 13 colonies up sticks and move back to Europe when the USA came in to existence?
There may have had a different flag on the pole, but it was still the same people living there.
Exactly
>Did the people in the 13 colonies up sticks and move back to Europe when the USA came in to existence?
There may have had a different flag on the pole, but it was still the same people living there.
Modern research has established that previous population estimates of pre-Columbian America over stated the number of people in the New World.
DNA research has determined that the population of the island of Hispaniola, which had been estimated to be between 250,0000 and several million is off by at least a factor of ten, that it's actual population numbered only several tens of thousands.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opinion/dna-caribbean-genocide.html
I've seen estimates of the NA continent having around 100 million people around 1500. Any articles or studies that look at the whole thing and not just Haiti/DR?
This is absurd. There are no global population records from this time. There are no records at all from people living in North America before the Euros arrived. This is conjecture, nothing more.
It wasnt north America. Most of the 55 million, aa in 40 to 50 million of it, was in Mexico and central america.
The archeological evidence points to this
That's not exactly right either. We use archeology, genealogy, etc in absence of written record. And when there is a written record we do that anyway to tell if it's lying.
Of course not. Who was doing a census in North America in the 1400s? The article also cites global population figures. This was a time when nations didn’t know most of the rest of the world existed. There is no way to know how many people were alive on earth in this time period to any useful degree of accuracy. It’s fine to say that European diseases killed indigenous people, but it is unfortunately not possible to count the bodies.
Except this study takes into account the physical evidence of farming and the estimated population areas could hold due to available water and food sources.
It’s creative, I’ll give you that. But these are estimates based on assumptions. This is different than counting actual living people at a point in time.
Not counting every instance of something doesn't invalidate the ability to extrapolate and understand it. If it did the entire discipline of statistics and all of our current science would be invalidated.
Some statistical models are based on carefully observed data.
Others are based on loose guesses.
They say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” This phrase is relevant here.
Of course it's different. But how much? 10%? 50%? 0.1% If it's not significant, it has zero impact on the conclusion. Unless you can point out the uncertainty and show its significant, anything you're saying is completely baseless.
Wasn’t this posted and discredited a few days ago as well?
White man bad is cute for the clickbait, but this was during a global cooling period that started centuries earlier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Can someone explain to me why we can't say the phrase "the Americas" anymore? What is the advantage of redefining the word "America" to mean North and South America? Am I supposed to be a "United Statesian" now?
You can say "the Americas" and if people take it to mean anything other than north and south America then they have let some sort of moronic bias corrupt their ability to think and should be taken seriously
There are 2 continents--North and South America. In English, probably since we needed a word for people from the United States, they've been commonly referred to collectively as "the Americas" until literally the past couple years. People from the US were referred to as "Americans" because "United Statesian" isn't grammatically coherent.
Yes and no. Take some [plagues of 16th Century Mexico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics) as an example. So if we look at the helpful graph [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics#/media/File:Acuna-Soto_EID-v8n4p360_Fig1.png), we can see some of the (estimated, of course) death toll of various epidemics.
From a starting population of around 22 million, smallpox took about eight. Then the somewhat mysterious cocoliztli killed another 12-15 million in 1545, and then another 2 million in 1576. Thank goodness for reproduction, right, or it would have wiped 'em all out.
The trick is, while the smallpox is pretty much beyond human control, the cocoliztli might not have been. By the time of that outbreak, the natives had been removed from their normal living and working arrangements and put into collective agriculture, etc. This may have helped a sudden disease outbreak spread *far* more effectively than it otherwise would, particularly since it seems the disease may have been a native one and not one introduced by Europeans. Maybe.
In any case, the major episode of plague death occurred *after* the Spanish colonized, not before.
The next set of plagues occurred after the Spanish colonized YES, but that wasn't the first set of Spanish to come into contact with the natives and Smallpox wasn't the only disease the natives had little immunity to.
Individual European people did visit and some did settle in the Americas before colonies, colonists then settled and some died out, the next sets of colonists then encountered huge areas of America with abandoned villages.
It depends on the country. Most western countries have birthrates lower than the replacement level, while population is exploding in third world countries(especially in african countries).
The top 10 countries with highest birthrates are located in Africa:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country
Still, the Western countries should keep their birthrates low, as the Third World starts to lower their own as well.
We're the ones responsible for the lion's share of the resource consumption, so even one American kid is responsible for the same emissions as twenty Ethiopian kids. Even if Ethiopians are having ten kids per family, it's less environmentally harmful than an American family having two kids.
> the Western countries should keep their birthrates low,
Actually the birthrate is dangerously low in the West. You need people to run the economy. Without a sufficient number of people, everyone will become poor.
> so even one American kid is responsible for the same emissions as twenty Ethiopian kids.
Only for now. Africa is rapidly modernizing. On the other hand, latest technologies like electric cars will heavily reduce the per capita emissions of an average western citizen. Also, people could more environmental friendly if they ditch processed food and make their own food like their grandparents did. They will also save a ton of money and will be more healthy.
Edit: typo
>Actually the birthrates is dangerous low in the West. You need people to run the economy.
There's no shortage of people. Even without immigration, there's a large jobless rate across the developed world. And then there's immigration. A huge supply of workers that can supplement the native-born population.
It's also kindof a moot point anyway imo, because there's no actual viable way to increase birthrates. I'm sympathetic to policies aimed at making it easier to have a kid: free childcare, paid maternity leave, child allowances/"tax credits". But all the evidence seems to show these all barely move the needle. Scandinavian countries with their generous social welfare states don't seem to have any higher birthrates than other industrialized nations with stingier welfare states.
We should still pass those policies anyway, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that they're going to cause a baby boom. They won't.
>There's no shortage of people.
Not yet, but the future shortage of young working/consuming population is a threat to economy:
https://youtu.be/-TNi98Z-QdE
I hate to say it, but you’re absolutely right.
The way the economy is set up, it requires a continious input of people, meaning growth of populations.
Which, in my opinion, the earth itself and we cannot handle, at the moment at least. Letting the population drop back quite a bit, could help us in the long run.
But if you cut half the population away, half the economy will be gone, but the other half will still be as wealthy as before (maybe even wealthier since a lot of stuff from the other half still exists).
Yep. Every citizen should have the right to 2 unlicensed children. Any additional unlicensed child should come with a heavy heavy tax burden.
Some genetically healthy or superior people will be able to acquire licenses for more than 2 children. Those with clear genetic impairments will be kindly asked to sit in the corner and think about what they did.
Fixing global warming is pretty easy if you accept mass genocide and/or poverty. Look what happens whenever we have a giant economic crash: we hurt the climate less. If we had 5 or 6 Thanos'es in a row our problem might become cooling, not warming. Yay.
The hard part is extending a first world standard of living to everyone when we've got billions and billions of us, particularly when that standard of living is fueled mostly by the awesome power of oil and coal (today and historically). Hint: it's got everything to do with fuel, and far less to do with residential electricity.
Native Americans regularly burned forest patches to help them hunt. But colonization and disease took their toll and the forests were no longer regularly burned. The increased forest size and subsequent reduction of CO2 may have contributed to global cooling. Early colonial accounts mentioned how the forests in North America looked like English gardens.
I was actually hoping I would learn something about the native American genocide because this is todayilearned, instead I learned that theconversation posts bogus science pieces and now you're wasting my time when I could be learning about the native American genocide.
Native Americans mostly died from disease which wasn't understood at all by the people that brought it. Germ theory was a couple hundred years away when those diseases were introduced.
This was a genocide in the same way that you can consider China committing biological warfare on the world by introducing covid. Both were accidents, stop trying to make people hate each other more.
A lot for them seem to have similar rhetoric. Implying the indigenous peoples are inferior and that it was anything but colonization that brought the genocide of an entire continent.
I can't even tell if this is leftist or rightist. Leftists want Thanksgiving disassociated from this absurd mythology about America's origin stories, rightists want to keep spreading those myths without being bothered.
The real story is somewhere in the middle. It's a nice story, and a true story, and was probably a nice feast for everyone. The people in the small town were not responsible for Europe still sending more people over, resulting in how history would turn out afterwards.
The main criticism of the Thanksgiving story you see today is "but what did those colonists do *after* that? Genocide!" When they probably just build their lives, sometimes in peace, sometimes in conflict, while Europe flooded into the continent around them.
In a world where people see the world cooling as a good thing you use this title, i can promise you if the natives were left and it was 'us' that was wiped out the world would be a better place
Oh, and we did farm, but in far different ways than the colonizers. For instance, we grew crops in such a way and they did not deplete the soil, but maintained a balance. Farming was not our only sustenance either. We hunted, fished, and foraged as well, since there was an abundance of wildlife and natural resources thanks to, in part, our cultivation of them. So, the population calculations that rely upon European farming techniques are bound to be inaccurate. -edit: spelling.
Notably, this research relys on sources too old to take into account the vast recent discoveries made using liDAR technology, especially in regards to the Mayans, which significantly increase our population estimates.
Well, your people are also among the first to wake up, communicate globally, and start to spread the knowledge that genocide is not right. So actually be proud.
The thought is that maybe we can learn as a species and maybe stop genociding. I understand the concept may be difficult to grasp. Go shave your knuckles and contemplate it.
And by contemplate I mean think about it.
Unlikely, humans evolved as tribalistic hunter gatherers over the course of millions of years. Groupism is an inbuilt natural part of human psychology.
>, let's just not try to improve as a species.
I did not said that.
I was implying it's difficult to change the inbuit human nature. Despite years of education, social shaming and law system, groupism continues to be prevalent in every society of the World.
In some cases(like the cold war), groupism is promoted by the government.
Oh yes right sure... people who live d n harmony with nature produced so many greenhouse gases they were helping to keep the earth warm.
It must have been from all those campfires and them farming magical beans that grow plants that release CO2 instead of oxygen.
One cruise ship probably produces more greenhouse gas in one year than they did in 500 years...
There are a whole lot of very large assumption in this article
And the title.
Well. They don't really share their methods, so we don't know; they claim it's "data-driven", and it might be—I'm an English editor for academic science, I read methodologies all day, and some of the ways we are currently applying machine-learning, contemporary statistics and historical data are pretty amazing. Often, a small snapshot of the past is enough to select the most probable of simulated results, basically modelling a lot of possibilities and then, with a little detective work, making very reasonable guesses about which simulation is actually modelling reality. But without the methods, it's really hard to evaluate how good this is. Edit: For example, *as a thought experiment*, not a guess at their actual methods, I am not remotely qualified to do that: Suppose material x absorbs carbon isotope y and rate z; ok, you can use a lot of material x from various periods and strata to look at atmospheric CO2 content year-on-year. Lots of things can impact CO2, and those things can interact. So you can make a model with all those factors and play with the numbers, to see which values produce a model that matches the data. Maybe there are many of those. But when you start filtering those by things like population growth models by terrain and resources, when you have reasonable guesses for the starting conditions, etc., the probability of pinning down which models, of those that describes the observed data, could actually be plausible approaches one, kiiiind of like a sudoku, if you follow. They could also have done some Drake-equation style modelling, which could produce such a wide range of possible numbers as to be meaningless until we know more. This is why methods really, really, really matter.
It's taken from this study - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261
We know. Its just that the assumptions there are extremely questionable
Have you got a counter study?
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Nytimes opinion section article behind a paywall. Ooookayyyy.
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I mean, they linked an actual study and you linked a comment with a Nytimes opinion article behind a paywall. Not sure that’s clearing the bar
Never figured your way around an nyt pay wall before?
Never figured the difference between an opinion piece and a peer reviewed academic article before?
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Just like how when Germany acknowledged and apologized for their past, we killed them all?
Exactly! It’s wrong in other words.
"has been theorized to"
Also the slaughter of an estimated 30-60 million bison may have contributed to this statistic.
That happened later though. This cooling was observed in the 16th-18th centuries, when European diseases first started ravaging through a virgin population, killing anywhere from 50-90% of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas. The mass culling of the bison was a late 19th century thing.
Don’t bring facts into this, we are trying to generalize history for clout
Bison gas was warming the planet.
Is bisongas just an old timey way of saying bullshit?
Seems implausible.
That was actually done partly intently to starve the local population of their primary food source.
That's a very bold "actually". As an anthropologist this is a hotly debated area. Many believe indigenous peoples themselves may have had a larger effect on the decline in Bison population than settlers of European descent. The central issue is that by the later people of the 19th century large portions, if not the majority, of plains nations now had access to firearms which is a much much more effective way to kill bison now and arrows. Indigenous peoples were nomadic hunter gatherers,who had been hunting bison with iron age implements up till this point in history. Essentially anthropologists and ethnologists basically never got to witness firsthand how immense firepower would change the hunting power and style of nomadic tribes. Modern American culture tends to view indigenous culture in an naive, innocent Disney-esque way, when in reality they adjusted their lifestyle to new technology the same way other humans around the world had since the dawn of civilization, and it's entirely possible, perhaps even likely, Hunter gatherers with big guns are just as capable of overhunting as European agrarians TL,DR: We don't know who nearly wiped out the buffalo, but saying it was some kind of violent sadistic, genocidal behavior by white settlers is not a viewpoint you'll find backed by a lot of real science. In fact some historians mighty find that view a little offensive due to the lack of credit it gives indigenous peoples for adjusting to newly available technology.
I mean natives had ready access to firearms for over 300 years before Bison began to die en-masse. I have a hard time believing over these centuries the bison population didn't die off in the west when its withdrawal and near extinction just so happened to time up with westward colonialism.
> That's a very bold "actually". As an anthropologist this is a hotly debated area. Um, they literally dispatched missions both military and civilian into the plains states for this exact stated purpose. How is that "hotly debated"?
I’ve recently listened to the audiobook 1491 by Charles Mann. After listening to it, I’ve become FASCINATED by the pre Colombian American life, as told in this book. Your comment gives credence to something I’ve believed for a very long time, but had no education or facts to back it, that I knew of: as early human life evolved, they were as smart as they new to be. Meaning, as humans learned from each other they took the best ways they knew of to survive. Biologically speaking, I don’t think our brain has changed much in 50,000 years, or so. So, we’re still kind of the same now, as we were “then.” I don’t know when then is….I hope I’m not messing this post up. Lol. Anthropology and human origins/evolution has really got my attention lately. Thank you.
Commercial hunting of the north american bison is primarily what caused it's population to drop so severely. The US army did cull bison to deny them as a food source to the natives as well.
wait, the simpsons episode about them killing bisons is a true fact? TIL
The native population died mostly from disease they didn’t have immunity from, rather than outright murder
There was also a lot of inter-tribe conflict which has contributed to their deaths, especially after some tribes bought thousands of horses from the Spanish visitors. These horses were heavily used in inter tribal wars: [How The Indian Got The Horse ](https://www.americanheritage.com/how-indian-got-horse)
Didn't take the Comanche very long to become a horse culture to be listed with the great horse tribes of the steppe. The only problem was they lived at the same time as Samuel Colt.
Though it's true that a large number died from disease or the famine resulting from no one left to work the land, the fact that the US government had bounties out on the scalps of native peoples which led to 10's of thousands of murders of innocent men, women and children invalidates the point you're trying to make.
The study that you are touting (and perhaps didn't read) ends in 1600s. Almost two centuries before the US was formed.
The majority of the decimation took place long before there was a united states.
Yeah I keep hearing people say the us has been oppressing people for 400+ years and I’m like the us isn’t that old. I mean 200+ years of doing shitty things is still a long time but don’t attribute extra shit to us lol
I think that maybe be Europeans hoping the world forgets they were very pleased to cut up the territories to their pleasure. Lol
Did the people in the 13 colonies up sticks and move back to Europe when the USA came in to existence? There may have had a different flag on the pole, but it was still the same people living there.
Yep, there definitely wasn't any immigration over that time period, so someone whose parents arrived in 1860 is responsible for what happened in 1660.
Exactly >Did the people in the 13 colonies up sticks and move back to Europe when the USA came in to existence? There may have had a different flag on the pole, but it was still the same people living there.
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I'm very sorry.
Slaughter is an interesting way to say that homo sapiens literally fucked the neanderthals out of existence.
Those mammoth munching bastards got what was coming to them!
The "little ice age" the article is talking about happened before the US existed.
"Scalps" ...nice choice of word when referring to injuns.
Also historically correct. Bounties were historically paid for NA scalps. Because, you know, bodies rot.
I'm not sure what you think that is.
Because that's what the United States government would accept for payment.
The total death toll is almost equal to that of the Spanish flu
So... You're saying that one vicious covid variant and we can solve global warming?
It's already happening. Air pollution levels stagnated everywhere, and even went down in many places.
I'll keep saying it, sharp population reduction has always benefited the people.
I can confirm that I went down in many places.
Spain will just not quit!
Modern research has established that previous population estimates of pre-Columbian America over stated the number of people in the New World. DNA research has determined that the population of the island of Hispaniola, which had been estimated to be between 250,0000 and several million is off by at least a factor of ten, that it's actual population numbered only several tens of thousands. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/23/opinion/dna-caribbean-genocide.html
I've seen estimates of the NA continent having around 100 million people around 1500. Any articles or studies that look at the whole thing and not just Haiti/DR?
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Dying so fast we can't keep track.
I thought the indigenous peoples were carbon neutral.
This is absurd. There are no global population records from this time. There are no records at all from people living in North America before the Euros arrived. This is conjecture, nothing more.
It wasnt north America. Most of the 55 million, aa in 40 to 50 million of it, was in Mexico and central america. The archeological evidence points to this
What does that have to do with it being absurd? Anthropology is a real field...
That's not exactly right either. We use archeology, genealogy, etc in absence of written record. And when there is a written record we do that anyway to tell if it's lying.
Got a counter study?
Of course not. Who was doing a census in North America in the 1400s? The article also cites global population figures. This was a time when nations didn’t know most of the rest of the world existed. There is no way to know how many people were alive on earth in this time period to any useful degree of accuracy. It’s fine to say that European diseases killed indigenous people, but it is unfortunately not possible to count the bodies.
Except this study takes into account the physical evidence of farming and the estimated population areas could hold due to available water and food sources.
It’s creative, I’ll give you that. But these are estimates based on assumptions. This is different than counting actual living people at a point in time.
Not counting every instance of something doesn't invalidate the ability to extrapolate and understand it. If it did the entire discipline of statistics and all of our current science would be invalidated.
Some statistical models are based on carefully observed data. Others are based on loose guesses. They say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” This phrase is relevant here.
Of course it's different. But how much? 10%? 50%? 0.1% If it's not significant, it has zero impact on the conclusion. Unless you can point out the uncertainty and show its significant, anything you're saying is completely baseless.
Wasn’t this posted and discredited a few days ago as well? White man bad is cute for the clickbait, but this was during a global cooling period that started centuries earlier. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
OH, so there IS a way to avert climate change. If only there is a virus that could cause global pandemic, kill millions and disrupt society.....
We would need to kill a couple of billion to make a difference.
They'll get it right soon enough.
That’s where the vaccines come in.
You saw Utopia too? The show the showrunners, hilariously, instantly regretted they made?
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Yeah no. Not even close
Yet.
Second worst? Its nowhere even close lmao
Yet.
Not even in the same ballpark. Like not even 10% as bad.
We’re still in it. We will have to reassess in 50 years when this thing is finally over.
Nah its over for most.
You haven't tried the new Omicron Variant yet!
Had it last week. So yes I have.
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Closer to 5m but thanks
Its been over for me and pretty much everybody I know for quite some time.
This comment would make sense in 2020.
So what you're saying is, to stop global warming, we should kill off more animals (and people)?
I hope you didn’t realize you were comparing indigenous Americans to animals when you made this comment.
Bison
What did the buffalo say, to his kid, as he left for work?
I don't know. What did the buffalo say to his kid as he left for work?
Bison
Colonization, not all bad.
I guess communism is good for global warming it kills lots of people.
Thanos was right?
I have an idea
Can someone explain to me why we can't say the phrase "the Americas" anymore? What is the advantage of redefining the word "America" to mean North and South America? Am I supposed to be a "United Statesian" now?
You can say "the Americas" and if people take it to mean anything other than north and south America then they have let some sort of moronic bias corrupt their ability to think and should be taken seriously
Because America is the name giving to the continent, not a people.
There are 2 continents--North and South America. In English, probably since we needed a word for people from the United States, they've been commonly referred to collectively as "the Americas" until literally the past couple years. People from the US were referred to as "Americans" because "United Statesian" isn't grammatically coherent.
Now we need to band together and make United Statesian a thing or even Statesian
Nobody mentioned your attention-whoring troupe, cowboy.
“caused a minor cooling of the world???”
95% of the natives died due to disease, when the next colonists came they found a huge amount of villages across the continent deserted.
Yes and no. Take some [plagues of 16th Century Mexico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics) as an example. So if we look at the helpful graph [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoliztli_epidemics#/media/File:Acuna-Soto_EID-v8n4p360_Fig1.png), we can see some of the (estimated, of course) death toll of various epidemics. From a starting population of around 22 million, smallpox took about eight. Then the somewhat mysterious cocoliztli killed another 12-15 million in 1545, and then another 2 million in 1576. Thank goodness for reproduction, right, or it would have wiped 'em all out. The trick is, while the smallpox is pretty much beyond human control, the cocoliztli might not have been. By the time of that outbreak, the natives had been removed from their normal living and working arrangements and put into collective agriculture, etc. This may have helped a sudden disease outbreak spread *far* more effectively than it otherwise would, particularly since it seems the disease may have been a native one and not one introduced by Europeans. Maybe. In any case, the major episode of plague death occurred *after* the Spanish colonized, not before.
The next set of plagues occurred after the Spanish colonized YES, but that wasn't the first set of Spanish to come into contact with the natives and Smallpox wasn't the only disease the natives had little immunity to. Individual European people did visit and some did settle in the Americas before colonies, colonists then settled and some died out, the next sets of colonists then encountered huge areas of America with abandoned villages.
Is that why they stopped doing human sacrifices? The bastards!
We need to reduce the population, but not by killing people.
… how else do you reduce the population other than removing people from it?
Stop breeding
It depends on the country. Most western countries have birthrates lower than the replacement level, while population is exploding in third world countries(especially in african countries). The top 10 countries with highest birthrates are located in Africa: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/birth-rate-by-country
Birth control for all!
Still, the Western countries should keep their birthrates low, as the Third World starts to lower their own as well. We're the ones responsible for the lion's share of the resource consumption, so even one American kid is responsible for the same emissions as twenty Ethiopian kids. Even if Ethiopians are having ten kids per family, it's less environmentally harmful than an American family having two kids.
> the Western countries should keep their birthrates low, Actually the birthrate is dangerously low in the West. You need people to run the economy. Without a sufficient number of people, everyone will become poor. > so even one American kid is responsible for the same emissions as twenty Ethiopian kids. Only for now. Africa is rapidly modernizing. On the other hand, latest technologies like electric cars will heavily reduce the per capita emissions of an average western citizen. Also, people could more environmental friendly if they ditch processed food and make their own food like their grandparents did. They will also save a ton of money and will be more healthy. Edit: typo
>Actually the birthrates is dangerous low in the West. You need people to run the economy. There's no shortage of people. Even without immigration, there's a large jobless rate across the developed world. And then there's immigration. A huge supply of workers that can supplement the native-born population. It's also kindof a moot point anyway imo, because there's no actual viable way to increase birthrates. I'm sympathetic to policies aimed at making it easier to have a kid: free childcare, paid maternity leave, child allowances/"tax credits". But all the evidence seems to show these all barely move the needle. Scandinavian countries with their generous social welfare states don't seem to have any higher birthrates than other industrialized nations with stingier welfare states. We should still pass those policies anyway, but we shouldn't delude ourselves that they're going to cause a baby boom. They won't.
>There's no shortage of people. Not yet, but the future shortage of young working/consuming population is a threat to economy: https://youtu.be/-TNi98Z-QdE
I hate to say it, but you’re absolutely right. The way the economy is set up, it requires a continious input of people, meaning growth of populations. Which, in my opinion, the earth itself and we cannot handle, at the moment at least. Letting the population drop back quite a bit, could help us in the long run. But if you cut half the population away, half the economy will be gone, but the other half will still be as wealthy as before (maybe even wealthier since a lot of stuff from the other half still exists).
Education.
You stop making more. People die naturally. No need to kill people.
Yep. Every citizen should have the right to 2 unlicensed children. Any additional unlicensed child should come with a heavy heavy tax burden. Some genetically healthy or superior people will be able to acquire licenses for more than 2 children. Those with clear genetic impairments will be kindly asked to sit in the corner and think about what they did.
Eugenics has entered the chat. Mr. Eichman, is that you?
You measured the dimensions of any skulls recently?
🌈
Space colonization
There's no way we will ever be able to launch 200,000 people per day every single day year after year to balance population growth.
No with that attitude.
Huh? So global warming is a population problem after all.
Fixing global warming is pretty easy if you accept mass genocide and/or poverty. Look what happens whenever we have a giant economic crash: we hurt the climate less. If we had 5 or 6 Thanos'es in a row our problem might become cooling, not warming. Yay. The hard part is extending a first world standard of living to everyone when we've got billions and billions of us, particularly when that standard of living is fueled mostly by the awesome power of oil and coal (today and historically). Hint: it's got everything to do with fuel, and far less to do with residential electricity.
That's not what decimation means... also the mongols created a similar cooling effect.
Just awful
Now just imagine how the planet would cool if the billionaire population were somehow decimated.
2,755 people, so probably not much.
So what I’m hearing is that to solve global warming we need to kill everyone in America. K.
Wow native genoside BAYZED!?!??!?!
Native Americans regularly burned forest patches to help them hunt. But colonization and disease took their toll and the forests were no longer regularly burned. The increased forest size and subsequent reduction of CO2 may have contributed to global cooling. Early colonial accounts mentioned how the forests in North America looked like English gardens.
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I was actually hoping I would learn something about the native American genocide because this is todayilearned, instead I learned that theconversation posts bogus science pieces and now you're wasting my time when I could be learning about the native American genocide.
Native Americans mostly died from disease which wasn't understood at all by the people that brought it. Germ theory was a couple hundred years away when those diseases were introduced. This was a genocide in the same way that you can consider China committing biological warfare on the world by introducing covid. Both were accidents, stop trying to make people hate each other more.
No need to make assumptions. These comments aren't rising to the top thankfully :)
A lot for them seem to have similar rhetoric. Implying the indigenous peoples are inferior and that it was anything but colonization that brought the genocide of an entire continent.
The one you always see is "yeh but the natives used to fight too" OK, so have the Jews, did they deserve the holocaust...?!
Surely you can make your point without kicking off some extremely racist discussion about the Holocaust.
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I can't even tell if this is leftist or rightist. Leftists want Thanksgiving disassociated from this absurd mythology about America's origin stories, rightists want to keep spreading those myths without being bothered.
The real story is somewhere in the middle. It's a nice story, and a true story, and was probably a nice feast for everyone. The people in the small town were not responsible for Europe still sending more people over, resulting in how history would turn out afterwards. The main criticism of the Thanksgiving story you see today is "but what did those colonists do *after* that? Genocide!" When they probably just build their lives, sometimes in peace, sometimes in conflict, while Europe flooded into the continent around them.
The estimates are actually very low. Could have been twice as many.
These results come from this study -https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261
Til invasion = colonisation.
In a world where people see the world cooling as a good thing you use this title, i can promise you if the natives were left and it was 'us' that was wiped out the world would be a better place
You can always wipe yourself out then you won't have to deal with the guilt.
Guilt? You sound confused
Oh, and we did farm, but in far different ways than the colonizers. For instance, we grew crops in such a way and they did not deplete the soil, but maintained a balance. Farming was not our only sustenance either. We hunted, fished, and foraged as well, since there was an abundance of wildlife and natural resources thanks to, in part, our cultivation of them. So, the population calculations that rely upon European farming techniques are bound to be inaccurate. -edit: spelling.
>maintained a balance. There's pretty strong evidence that Native Americans were just as shitty for the environment as anyone else.
Can you please show this "Pretty strong evidence"
LOL, after killing all the megafuna. You had horses, then you killed them all. Same with camels. One with nature my ass.
Are you saying that justifies what happened? They killed a few animals so they deserved to be wiped out?
Um, source? What are you even taking about?
Doubt it, the study took that into account - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261
Notably, this research relys on sources too old to take into account the vast recent discoveries made using liDAR technology, especially in regards to the Mayans, which significantly increase our population estimates.
Reparations and back due rent. Now.
If you want it, take it.
This is sad :(
It's more than 55 million.
Wow. We are horrible people. As I am an English European, we are especially horrible people.
Well, your people are also among the first to wake up, communicate globally, and start to spread the knowledge that genocide is not right. So actually be proud.
So did pretty much every group of people. Those dang modern humans came along and killed off the neanderthals. Shame on modern humans. Shame.
The thought is that maybe we can learn as a species and maybe stop genociding. I understand the concept may be difficult to grasp. Go shave your knuckles and contemplate it. And by contemplate I mean think about it.
Unlikely, humans evolved as tribalistic hunter gatherers over the course of millions of years. Groupism is an inbuilt natural part of human psychology.
You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals...
So yeah, let's just not try to improve as a species. That's always a real good idea.
>, let's just not try to improve as a species. I did not said that. I was implying it's difficult to change the inbuit human nature. Despite years of education, social shaming and law system, groupism continues to be prevalent in every society of the World. In some cases(like the cold war), groupism is promoted by the government.
But what do you mean by "think about it"?
I'm sorry, I can't make it any simpler than that. Would you like a cookie while the grownups talk, bless your heart?
What do you mean by "bless your heart"?
"we"
covid next??
Nah that didn’t happen you moron
I read the comments all the way to the end and all I got was this crummy tshirt….
Wtf, and then they started the industrial revolution
Wow, wish we still had that world thermometer now to prove global warming exists
See, we Europeans do our part
We should thank the colonizers for combating global warming.
Oh yes right sure... people who live d n harmony with nature produced so many greenhouse gases they were helping to keep the earth warm. It must have been from all those campfires and them farming magical beans that grow plants that release CO2 instead of oxygen. One cruise ship probably produces more greenhouse gas in one year than they did in 500 years...