Population
Further information: Population of Native CaliforniaEstimates for the pre-contact populations of most native groups in California have varied substantially. The anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber thought that the 1770 population of the Chumash might have been about 10,000. Alan K. Brown concluded that the population was not over 15,000. Sherburne F. Cook at various times estimated the aboriginal Chumash as 8,000, 13,650, 20,400, and 18,500.
Some scholars have suggested that Chumash population may have declined substantially during a "protohistoric" period (1542–1769 CE) when intermittent contacts with the crews of Spanish ships—including those of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo's expedition who wintered in the Santa Barbara Channel in AD 1542-43—brought disease and death. But the Chumash appear to have been thriving in the late 18th century when Spaniards first began actively colonizing the California coast. Whether the deaths began earlier with the contacts with ships' crew, or only later with the construction of several Spanish missions at Ventura, Santa Barbara, Lompoc, Santa Inez, and San Luis Obispo, the Chumash were eventually devastated by Old World diseases such as influenza and smallpox, to which they had no immunological resistance. By 1900, their numbers had declined to just 200. Estimates of Chumash people today range from 2,000 to 5,000.
Read more about this topic: Chumash People
Famous quotes containing the word population:
“The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.”
—Adolf Hitler (18891945)
“The population of the world is a conditional population; these are not the best, but the best that could live in the existing state of soils, gases, animals, and morals: the best that could yet live; there shall be a better, please God.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft thats 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. Were in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)