But within a few decades after Columbus' arrival, the Indigenous people of the Americas were decimated by what anthropologist Eric Wolf called the "Great Dying" — a combination of epidemic disease, warfare and enslavement that led to a rapid decline in the Native population.
The answer to that question has been surprisingly elusive, and estimates based on historical censuses, archaeological sites and land carrying capacity in the Western Hemisphere have varied wildly.
People have lived in the Americas for at least 14,000 years, having entered the continents via the region around the Bering Strait. Archaeological evidence shows these first Americans dispersed throughout the newly encountered lands fairly quickly. But what happened to the population between that dispersal and the arrival of Columbus is a huge unknown; estimates of the number of Indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere in 1492 have ranged from 1 million to 112 million people.
One of the first modern researchers who attempted to quantify the Indigenous population prior to Columbus was anthropologist Henry Dobyns. In a 1983 book, Dobyns used estimates of how many people each type of landscape could support as well as historical records of 16th-century disease epidemics to arrive at an Indigenous population estimate of around 112 million people — more than 100 times larger than some previous experts had believed.
But a burst of archaeological research in the 1970s and 1980s revealed that the Americas were not uniformly settled, Milner said. Dobyns' estimates were therefore much too high.
Robert Kelly, archaeologist at University of Wyoming
In a 2019 study, geographers compiled 129 population estimates from 82 published studies to model the hemisphere-wide distribution of the Indigenous population in 1492. The researchers split the hemisphere into seven regions — the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, Inca territory, Amazonia, North America and the rest of the Americas — and reached a combined estimate of 60.5 million. Their estimate for North America (modern-day Canada and the U.S.) was about 3 million to 6 million, less than one-third of Dobyns' estimate of 18 million.
Native Americans lived in large settlements such as this one at Cahokia Mounds, an archaeological site near modern-day St. Louis, Missouri. (Image credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images)A regional perspective – North America
But the people we know the most about from an archaeological standpoint are Indigenous groups in the U.S. and Canada.
"Our mean estimates," Milner and Chaplin wrote, "indicate that North America held roughly 2.8 to 5.7 million people" or a "best estimate" of 3.8 million people in the early 16th century, before European diseases dramatically decreased the size of the Indigenous population.
Charcoal from hearths is one of the main human-made things that archaeologists use to radiocarbon-date a site. The radiocarbon data provides a range of dates showing when the firewood was likeliest to have been used.
In a 2009 study, Matthew Peros, a geographer at Bishop's University in Quebec, and co-authors mathematically combined the radiocarbon date ranges in CARD to generate a single curve that revealed how common C-14 dates were over time. At the time, CARD had about 25,000 records.
They found that the population of North America increased rapidly around 50 B.C. and peaked around A.D. 1150. From that time until European contact, the Indigenous population may have been declining, possibly because of increased mortality from diseases like tuberculosis as people aggregated into denser settlements.
In a 2025 study, Kelly and colleagues created a radiocarbon date curve, which revealed a Native American population peak around A.D. 1150. (Image credit: Kelly et al. / PNAS)In a 2025 study, Kelly and co-authors found a similar temporal peak. By that time, CARD's dataset had ballooned to over 100,000 dates, making the estimate more robust.
But how large was that population? By combining the radiocarbon date curve with a starting population and factoring in average annual population growth, researchers can estimate the number of people living in North America around 1492, Peros said.
"Had Europeans tried settling the continent at A.D. 1000, they would have run into a much, much larger Indigenous population," Kelly said. At that time, the city of Cahokia, near modern-day St. Louis, encompassed 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) and had a population of nearly 20,000 people.
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Milner is optimistic they'll eventually get there. "Will it be done in my lifetime? Probably not," he said. "It's time-consuming, laborious and not especially flashy work to do."
"The world's population has more than doubled in my lifetime; that's unheard of in human existence," Milner said. "Environmental scientists are really trying to look at what's happened over long periods of time to give us a range of variation of what might happen in the future. We have to make some informed decisions about how to manage our landscape and accommodate these changes."
"North America was not an empty continent when the Europeans arrived," Peros said. "There were people and civilizations pretty much everywhere in the Americas for a long period of time. It is important for people to understand that when we talk about questions of reconciliation and when we do land acknowledgements."
How much do you know about the first people to reach the Americas? Find out with our First Americans quiz!
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