hello I was looking at a population chart recently and realized that there are way more people in Eurasia than in the Americas. Was it always like this? If the population imbalance is due to exposure to old world disease surely after 500 years it would have recovered by now right?

Question

hello I was looking at a population chart recently and realized that there are way more people in Eurasia than in the Americas. Was it always like this? If the population imbalance is due to exposure to old world disease surely after 500 years it would have recovered by now right?

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Answer 1

In addition to the other points mentioned here’s a few more things to consider:

The Indian subcontinent and China are both heavily populated which will skew Eurasian’s numbers.

Eurasia (54.8 km^2 ) is larger than the Americas. (42.55 km^2 ). On top of that the actual livable area is likely different.

Eurasia had massive empires with heavy usage of metal implements which differed significantly from the indigenous peoples of the Americas and likely affected population growth.