No More Overlooking Europe 1.5 Million Years Ago Invade Kill Colonized Holocaust

In contrast, Thornton has pointed out that there were disastrous epidemics and population losses during the first half of the sixteenth century “resulting from incidental contact, or even without direct contact, as disease spread from one American Indian tribe to another.”28 Thornton has also challenged Dobyns’ much higher Indigenous population estimates, which are based on the Malthusian assumption that “populations tend to increase to, and beyond, the limits of the food available to them at any particular level of technology.”29 As Thornton has explained, “human populations do not necessarily expand to the numerical limits their technologies and natural resources allow.”30 Thornton has also cited contemporary research which “indicates no relationship between population size and carrying capacity of their environments” for Indigenous populations in what is today the United States.31 Thornton’s estimate that about 75 million Indigenous people lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 and his estimate that more than 5 million lived in what later became the continental U.S. are arguably the most methodologically circumspect and reliable current appraisals for researchers in this field. As James Wilson has suggested, Thornton’s estimate of a total of more than 7 million Indigenous people north of Mexico is probably “the nearest to a generally accepted figure,” and “a figure for the Western Hemisphere as whole of 75 to 100 million” is not unreasonable.32 Future research may disclose an even larger Indigenous population, but Thornton’s carefully considered, mid-range estimates provide a vital starting point for the development of informed and reasonable, if very rough, estimates of the total loss of life in the Indigenous Holocaust.