Population Estimates
Population Estimates
It has become apparent that I will need to be able to justify some upcoming events. A major factor in that justification is the population of the Khanates, The Mayan and Middle American kingdoms as well as the Empire and Paititi.
There is so much controversy regarding pre-contact demographics that any attempt to calculate the number of people living in the Americas before Columbus is an act of Anthropological bravado at the very least. Estimates vary wildly for the hemisphere from 8,400,000 (Kroeber, 1938) to 100,000,000 (Borah, 1964). For North America the variance is even greater; from Kroeber’s 1938 estimate of 900,000 (about 11% of the hemisphere by his calcs) to a whopping 18,000,000 (Dobyns, 1983).
Dobyns didn’t provide a hemispheric estimate in ’83, but if the ratio is the same as his 1966 calculations (h’sphere-90,043,000, NA 9,800,000) the 1983 hemispheric number is a stratospheric 165,385,102! In 1999 the UN estimated the global population in 1500 AD at 500,000,000. For comparison, the population of Western Europe was in the vicinity of 57,294,000 (easier to estimate since there are extant records).
Portugal...1,000,000
Spain......6,800,000
UK.........3,142,000
China......103,000.000
India......90,401,000
I approached this by taking a series of estimated populations for North America and the Hemisphere which had been calculated between 1910 (Mooney) and 1983 (Dobyns).
I calculated the average of the numbers and the mean as well. Then I eliminated the High and low numbers and did the same exercise again. From this I arrived at my own estimate (highly unscholarly as it might be) for the populations of the hemisphere and North America (which in this context is above the Rio Grande) in 1500. My numbers fell comfortably in the middle.
Hemisphere...53,888,590
North.........7,670,163
Central......20,351,904
South........25,866,523
Using World Population estimates for 1300, I arrived at an estimate of the continental population two centuries before the present point in the story. Now I had a rough idea of the growth rate over the intervening 200 years since Shi-bi landed in Panama.
Playing with growth rates year by year, estimating the impact of new tools and agriculture as well as the various plagues that afflicted the population, I arrived at the following population estimate for TTL;
Hemisphere...60,454,708
North..........8,503,965
Central.......22,932,484
South.........29,018,260
The differences are not huge, but remember that the OTL estimates are pre-disease and the TTL estimates are Post disease.