What are the possible reasons for the decrease in native population in Americas after the contact between Old and New World?
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European colonization of the Americas resulted in the killing of so many native people that it transformed the environment and caused the Earth’s climate to cool down, new research has found. Show
Settlers killed off huge numbers of people in conflicts and also by spreading disease, which reduced the indigenous population by 90% in the century following Christopher Columbus’s initial journey to the Americas and Caribbean in 1492. This “large-scale depopulation” resulted in vast tracts of agricultural land being left untended, researchers say, allowing the land to become overgrown with trees and other new vegetation. The regrowth soaked up enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to actually cool the planet, with the average temperature dropping by 0.15C in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the study by scientists at University College London found. “The great dying of the indigenous peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth system in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the UCL team of Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark Maslin and Simon Lewis. The drop in temperature during this period is known as the “Little Ice Age”, a time when the River Thames in London would regularly freeze over, snowstorms were common in Portugal and disrupted agriculture caused famines in several European countries. The UCL researchers found that the European colonization of the Americas indirectly contributed to this colder period by causing the deaths of about 56 million people by 1600. The study attributes the deaths to factors including introduced disease, such as smallpox and measles, as well as warfare and societal collapse. Researchers then calculated how much land indigenous people required and then subsequently fell into disuse, finding that around 55m hectares, an area roughly equivalent to France, became vacant and was reclaimed by carbon dioxide-absorbing vegetation. The study sketches out a past where humans were influencing the climate long before the industrial revolution, where the use of fossil fuels for the manufacturing of goods, generation of electricity and transportation has allowed tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere. Widespread deforestation for agriculture and urban development has also spurred the release of greenhouse gases, causing the planet to warm by around 1C over the past century. Scientists have warned that the world has little over a decade to drastically reduce emissions or face increasingly severe storms, drought, heatwaves, coastal flooding and food insecurity. The revegetation of the Americas after European arrival aided declines of global carbon content in the air, dropping by around seven to 10 parts of carbon dioxide for every million molecules of air in the atmosphere. This compares to the 3ppm of carbon dioxide that humanity is currently adding to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels. “There is a lot of talk around ‘negative emissions’ approaching and using tree-planting to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to mitigate climate change,” study co-author Chris Brierley told the BBC. “And what we see from this study is the scale of what’s required, because the great dying resulted in an area the size of France being reforested and that gave us only a few parts per million. “This is useful; it shows us what reforestation can do. But at the same, that kind of reduction is worth perhaps just two years of fossil fuel emissions at the present rate.” journal article Patterns of Demographic Change in the AmericasHuman Biology Vol. 64, No. 3, Special Issue on the Biological Anthropology of New World Populations (June 1992) , pp. 361-379 (19 pages) Published By: Wayne State University Press https://www.jstor.org/stable/41464288 Read and download Log in through your school or library Read Online (Free) relies on page scans, which are not currently available to screen readers. To access this article, please contact JSTOR User Support. We'll provide a PDF copy for your screen reader.With a personal account, you can read up to 100 articles each month for free. Get StartedAlready have an account? Log in Monthly Plan
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Abstract Considerable scholarly debate has focused on the nature of demographic change in the Americas before and after 1492. Recent research on human skeletal samples and related archeological materials suggests that morbidity and mortality were increasing throughout much of the Western Hemisphere before 1492 in response to increased population density, increased sedentism, and changing subsistence. The evidence suggests that after 1492 population reduction was caused not by continental pandemics but by localized or regional epidemics augmented by social and economic disruption. The twentieth century has witnessed remarkable Native American population recovery, fueled both by improvements in health care and changing definitions of "being Indian." Journal Information A worldwide forum for state-of-the-art ideas, methods, and techniques in the field, Human Biology focuses on genetics in its broadest sense. Included under this rubric are: human population genetics, evolutionary and genetic demography, quantitative genetics, evolutionary biology, ancient DNA studies, biological diversity interpreted in terms of adaptation (biometry, physical anthropology), and interdisciplinary research linking biological and cultural diversity (inferred from linguistic variability, ethnological diversity, archaeological evidence, etc.) Publisher Information Wayne State University Press is a distinctive urban publisher committed to supporting its parent institution’s core research, teaching, and service mission by generating high quality scholarly and general interest works of global importance. Through its publishing program, the Press disseminates research, advances education, and serves the local community while expanding the international reputation of the Press and the University. Rights & Usage This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. What caused the decrease in the native population of America?War and violence. While epidemic disease was by far the leading cause of the population decline of the American indigenous peoples after 1492, there were other contributing factors, all of them related to European contact and colonization. One of these factors was warfare.
What was the main cause of the native population declining during the Columbian Exchange?Between 1492 and 1600, 90% of the indigenous populations in the Americas had died. That means about 55 million people perished because of violence and never-before-seen pathogens like smallpox, measles, and influenza.
What was an important factor in the great decrease of Native American populations after contact with the Europeans?Europeans carried a hidden enemy to the Indians: new diseases. Native peoples of America had no immunity to the diseases that European explorers and colonists brought with them. Diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles, and even chicken pox proved deadly to American Indians.
What was the reasons many of the Native American cultures were wiped out by the contact of European?Throughout the period of European colonisation, millions of Native Americans were killed, either in fighting or by outbreaks of European diseases to which their bodies had no immunity, such as smallpox.
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