The Great Dying in the Americas

A 2019 review of 119 regional estimates puts the population of the Americas before 1492 at about 60.5 million (interquartile range 44.8–78.2 million) and finds that epidemics brought by Europeans killed about 90 per cent of it within a century; the pre-contact figures are strongly disputed. The authors estimate that forest regrowing on some 56 million hectares of abandoned farmland took up carbon equal to about 3.5 ppm of atmospheric CO2 and, with carbon-cycle feedbacks and land-use change elsewhere, about 5 ppm: 47 to 67 per cent of a 7–10 ppm fall in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

The mechanism

COLONISATION

How it was checked

• EvidenceT5 INDEPENDENT SECULAR; Status: ADDED 2026-09-19
• Letter eraTHE RELEASES, AND THE ENCLOSURE THAT FOLLOWS EACH 1382 to 1694
• SourcesRECORD — A. Koch, C. Brierley, M. Maslin and S. Lewis, 'Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492', Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13-36 (abstract at UCL Discovery) · checked 19 September: Koch, Brierley, Maslin and Lewis, Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): abstract at UCL Discovery (read in a browser; WebFetch refused)