I never understood this. From what I was taught in history class, masses of native north & south americans died because of European diseases. And for each latin american country, of course there are large african and native descents, but from what I read each country has a massive part of Spanish heritage.
Nowadays, how many humans live between El Paso and Ushuaia? More than half a billion? Yet Spain is only a country of 40m people. How is this possible?
In: 36
Let’s imagine 500 Europeans arrived in South America in 1523 (500 years ago). We’ll call that 20 generations, and say each couple in each generation has four children who survive, causing the population to double each time. By now there’d be 500 million of them.
Obviously, that’s not what happened, but it shows that it’s not a particularly inexplicable population level.
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