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Comment by zeckalpha | Hacker News Reader

Indigenous populations started dropping centuries before Columbus and we don’t know why. (Of course they dropped further after Columbian contact)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia#Decline%20(13th%20an...

> The population of Cahokia began to decline during the 13th century, and the site was eventually abandoned by around 1350.

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The Cahokia region did, certainly, but that would have been a minor blip in the total North American population, especially compared to the ~90% loss that happened following European arrival.

The population decline of the Mayans happened around the same time. This decline was steep enough to be called a collapse. There has been much discussion as to the cause.

Yeah, no. The Classic Maya collapse dates to around 900, which is before Cahokia even gets going.

I think by "around the same time" he probably just means "plus or minus a few hundred years, before the Europeans". Point being that native collapse happened at large scale in multiple areas prior to European settling.

That's like saying the Roman and Carthaginian empires both fell around the same time, and thus were part of the same event. Pre-industrial populations naturally fluctuate over time, and some regions may have been in a slight decline prior to European contact, but nothing at all comparable to after contact, when population decreased by about 90% in 50 years.

Maya is notable because a region that once supported a large population quickly underwent large scale depopulation for reasons that are not clear to us today. This wasn't a matter of one nation collapsing only to absorbed by another. We're talking about a population in the millions to 10s of millions that just faded away. All of this occurred pre-Columbian.

>That's like saying the Roman and Carthaginian empires both fell around the same time, and thus were part of the same event.

Not trying to say they were caused by the same event but it does seem to be a trend that Native America had issues sustaining permanent population centers like you saw in other parts of the world.

> We're talking about a population in the millions to 10s of millions that just faded away.

Okay, this is just plain false. The Classical Maya collapse could be compared to the Fall of Rome or the end of the Han dynasty (although perhaps I should use Tang instead for historical proximity). That is to say, the Maya didn't disappear. Completely the opposite--the Classical Maya collapse is actually reflected in the rise of the Yucatec and other lowland Mayan city centers, notably Chichen Itza, which would itself decline a few hundred years later, before the city of Mayapan rose to prominence, again declining again a hundred-ish years later. Mayan city states remained independent and following Mayan cultural and religious practices even after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, with the last Mayan kingdom falling only in 1697. Even then, while no longer independent, Mayan culture still persists to this day.

There are civilizations that are hard to trace. What happened to the people of, say, Cahokia or Teotihuacan are still a mystery to this day. But the Maya are absolutely not one of those.

Europe also quickly underwent large scale depopulation when the western roman empire collapsed. That's how civilization collapse works. But in both cases these were isolated events, there is no such trend. Cities like Cholula have been continuously inhabited for over 2000 years. How long people remain in an area depends on the geography - in arid valley environments like mesopotamia or central mexico, both cities and civilizations tend to only last a few centuries as river patterns change, resulting in droughts and migrations, and a lack of natural barriers makes invasion common.

This. I don't know why people think of the Mayan empire or Cahokia as fundamentally different from the numerous "failed states" of the Mediterranean. I use quotes because there's increasing consensus that it's not so much a matter of failure as a matter of political revolution amongst the enslaved class forced to work in agriculture for the ruling class

No, there’s no indication of population dropping in that article, only the dissolution of a city.

I’m not read up on Cahokia, but it’s probably more similar to the dissolution/dispersal of the (lowland) Maya vs something like a mass die off.

Pre contact population centers were additionally in Mesoamérica & northern South America, where most of the total post contact population drop occurred.

That’s no indication at all. That’s like saying everyone in the old world was dying because gobekli tepe was abandoned in 3000 BC.

As Fernand Braudel said, populations in Europe, China and and North America seems to roughly mirror one another for most of the last 5,000 years. The only possible explanation is the climate. Some centuries were good in the northern hemisphere, and some were bad. Not all at once, and not uniformly, but enough that we can see some link.

There are stories of Roman and Asian contact with the America's. Perhaps disease was brought over earlier then we thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_trans-oceanic_co...

Is there a reason to assume disease couldn't have come into existence in this native population itself?

If a disease native to the Americas emerged and became endemic, it would have infected Europeans when they arrived. There’s a good CGP Grey video on this called Americapox.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk

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