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It wasn't an exaggeration- https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-darken-the-heavens-the-passenger-pigeon-in-indiana/ https://blog.history.in.gov/flocks-that-d

• shipman05 5y ago
  > Pre-Columbian animal density in the Americas was insane, from cod in the east, to buffalo in the middle, to salmon and sardines in the west. People thought it was limitless until it very abruptly wasn't. I'm unsure about the fisheries, but the other numbers are debated now. Until very recent times, the reports of European explorers pushing into the interior of North America were taken as a good proxy for the pre-Columbian state of those areas. We now know that those areas were far more densely populated before 1500 than they were more than 200 years later when European settlers started moving in. European diseases preceded European settlers and completely wiped out much of the continent's population. AFIK, it's still being debated, but it seems reasonable that: - Predators like wolves kept large herd animal numbers relatively low - Large populations of Native Americans killed those predators but continued to keep the numbers of herd animals low via hunting - Native American population collapse coupled with low numbers of predator species allowed bison herd numbers to explode - European settlers arrived in the 1700s and 1800s and made the mistaken assumption that both the Native American and bison populations they encountered represented the way things had always been.