As a result, Dobyns said, all colonial population estimates were too low. Many of them, put together just after epidemics, would have represented population nadirs, not approximations of precontact numbers. From a few incidents in which before and after totals are known with relative certainty, Dobyns calculated that in the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died. To estimate native numbers before Columbus, one thus had to multiply census figures from those times by a factor of twenty or more. The results obtained by this procedure were, by historical
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