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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   36598 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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In 2010, 5.2 million US Americans identified as native. The pre-Mayflower native population of what is today the US has been subject to many estimates but I think most seem to place it around 5-20 million.

In addition, most of those “natives” as of 2010 were 75%+ non-native by genetic origin and almost all would have been more than 50% non-native, certainly outside of Alaska. So I think it’s quite likely that absent any European colonization there would probably be a higher native North American population, sure.

2025 numbers are way up from 2010 but point taken about European admixture. Most of the explosion in Native American population numbers is just essentially white people self identifying as Native (I won’t name names).

Color me skeptical about pre-Columbian population numbers which are highly influenced by bogus culture war politics. 20 million is wild.

Pre-Columbian population isn't the right basis assuming (as is believed) many natives were wiped out by disease before the US was founded. The Mayflower was in 1620, which is considerably later than 1492.

Tangential, but I was expecting a lot more culture war fallout from Reich's pre-columbian population estimates paper. I guess even in 2020 that fell under "easier to just ignore than attack," especially after Saini's "the return of race science" failed to take him down.

Do you have a link for said paper, or a pointer to it?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-03053-2

Thank you!

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