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

It’s generally thought that Europe and Asian were more technologically developed because they had horses and because they had a long stretch of land in an east to west direction so that trade and migrations could occur without having to move across widely different climates. A trip from France to eastern China is much easier than a trip from Canada to southern Argentina. Thus in Eurasia much technology could be passed around and a lot of trade could occur. With advances in technology come the ability to feed more people. Horse of course helped with that effort. So, you’ll notice Asia in particular is heavily populated. They had rice. Rice can feed a lot of people on a small amount of land.

So at the time of Columbus, Eurasia was already pretty heavily populated compared to the Americas. Much of the original population of the Americas was wiped out as you know, but immigrants replaced the natives. However, despite the huge amount of immigration and the large families they had, it wasn’t enough to catch up with Europe’s population density, and they didn’t farm much rice so they got nowhere near Asia’s population density.