Medved's new Book: deconstructing leftist history

Gotta getta copy.... One other thing I'm reading now is that the biggest factor involved in reducing Amerind numbers was intermarriage and assimilation.

Since there were an estimated 100 million AMerinds in North and SOuth America pre-contact, its difficult to see how they all "mixed in" without being noticed. Genetics show that entire gene pools of Amerind populations went out like lights. The most compelling argument is the disease resistance they did not have.

Susquehannocks alone went from about 30000 to less than 150 in less than 100 years (Bray).

I think that you should get several POVs and some actual scholarship before snagging onto a piece of trivia posted by an ex movie critic .

actually, an ideological hack, not a serious thinker. Medved is part of the PR department of the religious right, and they have never valued brains very highly.

Bullshit. There might have been a hundred million people in China in 1500....

You need infrastructure and agriculture to support populations like that; particularly in the case of North America the idea of hunter-gatherers ever attaining such numbers is farcical.

The United States itself with all its technology and infrastructure and an ability to feed numbers of people vastly in excess of what Amerinds ever could have hoped to first reached a hundred million population around 1915:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081117151427AAiicXE

Your YAhoo clip is irrelevant. It asks when did the US population reach 100 million. The pre contact Amerinds in N and S America were separate hunter gatherer, and agrarian civilizations that had their own arcs.
Estimates for the total AMerind populations (pre contact) vary by an order of magnitude . They vary from a low of about12 million to a high of 112 million.Due to several lines of evidence including cultural distribution and genetics, the higher number is actually quite realistic (D. Stanford, B. Hadley).
The influx of Soluteeans prior to the original estimate of first migration, sends the population origins back to 20 or 23 thousand years ago> Further, genetic studies of mtDNA haplotypes and yDNA STR loci show a remarkeable diminishment of major haplotypes from widely extended pop areas. These data argue for a higher number. Maybe its not 112million, but you have no real evidence to say its not the case.
The difference tween us is I like to mull over evidence, you like to pronounce on it when it deviates from a comfort zone. (Science always messes with our comfort zones gunga)

PS, your "friend" Vine Deloria states that AMerinds all originated in the AMericas . (Of course Deloria , like you, was never a friend of evidence)

ALso, back to MEDVED, In 1763 British General Amherst ordered smallpox infected blankets to be distributed among the Iroquois, beginning an epidemic in that year. Thats a historically documented fact, so MEDVED is already showing he likes to spread some untruth. I wonder if Medved was being a water boy for Limbaughs old argument about more AMerinda alive today than in pre contact time? Seems Rush is often responsible for the origin of many of these fables.

I could picture the 12 million being possible if eleven million of it were in South/Central America and one in anything you'd call the U.S. and Canada but the 100M figure is a joke for the reasons I mentioned. Aside from North America not having anything even remotely close to the infrastructure to support anything like that there is the further consideration that Indians were living almost entirely on the coasts when Europeans got here and as I've heard it, that was because of some sort of a gigantic and multi-decade drought which had occurred somewhere in the 1300s which had eliminated such halfway organized societies as we find archaeological evidence of.

What some British officer might have done prior to the revolution is not what you normally hear wrt smallpox; the usual claim is that Americans did something like that in a campaign to eliminate interior Indians altogether in the 1800s and that is almost certainly what Medved is talking about; I plan on getting a copy of the book and will fill in details thereafter.

The genetics studies are the ones that lean toward the higher estimates, and in all cases, the populations centered around MEso and South America having 80% of the pop. Most scholrs agree that 12 million were in North America.

I suppose that if Im criticizing Medveds scholarship, Ill have to read hi accounts also. (I never cared for his movie revies because of his "Family" agendas geting in the way of artistic expression.