Overview
- The research, published in mid‑September in Nature Human Behaviour, models a median pre‑colonial Indigenous population of about 2.22 million and a loss of roughly 2.06 million people between 1788 and 1861.
- Authors used three independent approaches — archaeological data, genetic reconstructions and environmental computer modelling — to correct for biases in early colonial censuses and ethnographic records.
- The team attributes the rapid decline to introduced infectious diseases, frontier violence, malnutrition and dispossession, and one co‑author estimated that smallpox may have killed as many as 220,000 people on the east coast in the first decade after 1788.
- By 1861 the models suggest only about 7% of the estimated pre‑colonial population remained, and at current growth rates the Indigenous population would not reach parity with the 1788 estimate until around 2047.
- The authors and Indigenous partners say the findings reframe the scale of colonisation, underline long‑running intergenerational harm, and provide a quantitative basis for public truth‑telling, reparative policy discussion and further academic scrutiny.