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

Well the americas were mostly colonized.

While we have a pretty good idea the european landmass and asian landmass was pretty much populated by early humans over land bridges that came from Africa… africa was most likely the cradle of humanity, so everything spread away from that point, the european landmass compared to the African landmass is a much easier environment to thrive and live. So these populations grew…sure there was other human species too such as homo erectus, neanderthals and whatnot. But pretty much all thrived on the Eurasian landmass and mixed together genetically too.

While america.. was kinda semi cut off at the time of those events, any early humans that made it there got there over probably a southern route over what is now Chile, the odd raft or log and drifting over, or a northern asian route which is roughly the direction of alaska… so the population is lower by default sinply in lieu of envoiremental factors….while not exactly touched by these sweeping diseases and eventually it was mass colonised.

So purely just by how america as a landmass works these numbers just do not compare.

While europe had empires and cities, americas had mostly tribes that were isolated / smaller interconnected communities.