A new study reveals that Australia’s pre-colonization Indigenous population was approximately 2.22 million people, up to 7 times larger than previously estimated, exposing a devastating demographic catastrophe caused by subsequent disease and colonial violence.
https://www.sciencealert.com/australias-indigenous-population-was-7-times-larger-than-estimated-study-finds
15 Comments
> ‘colonial violence’..
Like when they adapted fox-hunting to aborigine-hunting?
Colonialism should be re-worded to genociders
There are some things, like the number of known chemical compounds or the heterogeneity of the Earth’s mantle, that either cannot or will not go down over time. Every metric of the horror of colonization is one of those.
Census results for 2026 won’t be out for a while yet, but for reference the 2021 figure was just under 1 million people
Edit: in 2011 it was 550k
From the article which is in pre-print.
They took medians from quite a wide range.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-5127915/v1
“Assuming an equal sex ratio, this places the total Ne range at 22,960–5,870,980.“
No other nation fucked up the world more than Brits.
As Ailton Krenak (indigenous writer from Brazil) said, every indigenous community that managed to survive to this day is pretty much living in a post-apocalyptic world. To see so many of your own people dying on purpose in such a short timeframe is an absolute horrific, Apocalyptic event.
First sentence:
> It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of what happened to Australia’s Indigenous population when Britain’s First Fleet invaded in 1788.
Right, and this article doesn’t do a great job on it either. The range is entirely estimated with 22,960–5,870,980. Now if we put that in US Dollars for a yearly salary that is the difference between Poverty and being so well off you’ll never have to step foot in a grocery store.
Quigley Downunder is probably the only way Americans knew anything about the crimes done during this time
Suuuuuure. The range is huge. Hardly factual
call it what it was. it was genocide.
How large was the population the Aboriginals succeeded? Or did those 65kyo cave painting’s that the Aboriginals themselves call trash or rubbish painting’s because they were done by someone else just don’t count anymore?
It would be good to see some more hard numbers about Australian aboriginal history. A lot of the ones floating around are obviously made up for politics “250,000 BC, and the BC stands for ‘before Cook’ “
The population estimate range is 1.13–4.41 million people.
Just because someone commented first, doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about. The 22,000 to 5,000,000 range people keep referring to is from a paper this one QUOTES and is from a genetics paper 10 years ago.
That is what genocide looks like.