Estimates European arrival in 1492 lead to 56 million deaths by 1600.
Wikipedia:
In 1492 the native population of North America north of the Rio Grande was seven million to ten million.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm...Quite a difference there...
In the book MASSACRES OF THE MOUNTAINS, (Page 15) written in 1880, it was estimated that the population of American Indians, was no more than one million, to 250,000.
I’ve read at most a few hundred thousand - “Mystic Warriors of The Great Plains”; incidentally the book that W. Churchill plagiarized out of. Not Winston, some fake Indian guy.
That’s something that has puzzled me, humankind has been around a long time, not in NA though.
North of the Rio Grand was absolutely nothing compared to the population of Mexico, Central America and South America at the time. It’s fairly accurate.
Something important in this is the term “the Americas”. This includes all of the new world from the Arctic to Antarctica. The Inca civilization alone was estimated to have a population of 10 million in 1527. I would venture to say that this is probably half of the prior population before diseases took their toll before 1527.