'It could have been a very different history': Researchers are finally starting to pin down how many Indigenous people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived

When Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas on Oct.

12, 1492, he encountered Indigenous Lucayans living on the Bahamian island now called San Salvador.

Columbus wrote in his diary about " great multitudes of men " who greeted him that day, bartered with him and told him about other groups who lived on nearby islands.

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.

For centuries, researchers have been trying to figure out how many Indigenous people lived in the Americas just prior to the fateful arrival of European colonizers.

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.

Recent research into Native American demography has revealed that the population peaked several centuries before Europeans showed up on the shores of North America — and that if Europeans had arrived at that peak, the entire history of the continent may have been different.

Early estimates of the Indigenous population 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.

"We don't have good quantitative estimates," George Milner , an anthropologist at Penn State, told Live Science.

"The numbers are all over the place." 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.

"In essence, Dobyns filled up the landscape to its maximum carrying capacity, so that all environmentally similar places were occupied by the same number of people," Milner said.