I had a conversation with an individual recently about how unusual it was that there were so few individuals who appeared to be Native American in North America today. (I say appear since no doubt many people have at least a small percentage of native American DNA if their families are not recent immigrants.)
Anyway, part of the conversation went into European colonization and how many Native Americans there were relative to Europeans during the colonization and manifest destiny time periods.
This individual claimed that the North Americas were not heavily populated, relative to standards of Europe at that time, and therefore the European settlers made up a more significant percentage of North America's population then I would have presumed. I'm wondering how accurate this claim was. Can anyone give me an idea of the actual density and general population of North America immediately prior to colonization, as well as what these numbers looked like after the first major deaths from diseases like smallpox and gonorrhoea?
I'd also be curious about how those numbers compared to number of colonists sent from Europe, but that's a harder number to define and articulate since it happened over a long length of time. It's not as important to me as simply understanding the population density of the Americas and how that compared to that of Europe.