Comments by "yessum15" (@yessum15) on "Whatifalthist" channel.

Wow. This seems poorly researched and remarkably racist. Really disappointing.
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@carlinthomas9482 Dude what are you doing? Are you just making shit up? 1) Are you seriously trying to extrapolate the entire population of 2 continents from a single genetic study of 1 ethnicity on an island? This is remarkably dumb. 2) Citations? If you're going to premise you're entire position on a National Geographic article, ya might want to tell people which article you're referring to (ie: title, date, author). For example: The following study analyzes all published estimates of the population of the Americas in the 1400s and arrives at a final estimate of a population size of 60 million. ( "Earth system impacts of the European arrival and great dying in the Americas after 1492" QUARTERNARY SCIENCE REVIEW 3/1/2019 Alexander Koch) This compared to estimates of the population of Europe during the same period which fall around 70 - 88 million. So, what does the sum total of the evidence seem to indicate?
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@andresabantoenns9697 We must also avoid making the mistake of entirely distinguishing deaths from disease from deaths war, since we know that disease in this case, was a tool of genocide. One of the reasons why smallpox ravaged the indigenous population was because it was purposely spread by European colonizers as part of the practice of biological warfare. Similarly, the efficacy of the disease in eradicating the native population was to a large extent caused by the conditions amenable to the spread of disease created by European war practices. Typically, upon exposure to the pathogen, the Native population would be expected to experience a rise in deaths followed by a leveling out and gradual recovery. However, deaths from war, destabilization of native societies, forced expulsions, overcrowding, purposeful "starving out", and general disenfranchisement worked symbiotically to promote the spread of disease and reduce the society's ability to recover from it. Much in the same way that many of the deaths in WWII concentration camps came from disease rather than outright execution, the Native depopulation is an example of disease as a tool of genocide. This is important to emphasize since there is a contemporary right-wing move to downplay the genocidal nature of the depopulation of the Americas by blaming it on disease (and of course by downwardly revising population estimates for the region in order to indirectly claim "it was empty when we got here")
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@carlinthomas9482 1) Genius, the article doesn't say that the population of these islands was small, it says that they were depopulated by invaders before the European arrival. These invaders came from the Americas. Think about it: If a 100K population is reduced to 10k due to invasion from a nearby country, then it's likely that the invading force was about the same size. In other words, this is not an argument for radically reducing our estimates of the population of the Americas, it is an argument for reorganizing the distribution of that population within the Americas. This says nothing about the total population of indigenous people across the 2 continents except to say that there are nations in those 2 continents large enough to support the military forces necessary to potentially depopulate island strings. 2) We should also note that this is new hypothesis with minimal evidenciary backing at this stage. The sample size is about 100 remains, with heavy reliance on subjective interpretations of pottery traditions in order address the issue of migration as a confounding variable. 3) "You use the high estimates" I actually didn't use the high estimates. I cited the reasonable estimate derived by the study linked after analyzing every published estimate. I already told you this. 4) "You proved my point" No. No one has ever claimed that the Americas were as densely populated as Europe. The issue at hand is whether they were as underpopulated as you characterized them. 60 million people is not dense population. But it is still a ton of people comprising a large chunk of the world's total population. Thus the indigenous genocide is a staggering tragedy affecting a proportion of people that can readily be compared to the total population of Europe at the time. 5) "Blood Libel - Europeans didn't know" Nonsense. They didn't have germ theory all worked out, but they definitely knew how to get someone sick and how to minimize their chance of recovery and maximize their chance of spread. This is pretty well documented. We know they purposely passed out blankets infected with smallpox in the hopes that disease would ravage their enemies. The use of this kind of biological warfare far precedes the American colonial era. They used to do this during medieval times.
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