The US native american population before 1492 was about 60 million people.

This was only a little less than the entire population of Europe, which was about 75 million.

And, it's nearly 20% of the current US population. More people than California and Florida combined. 3 times the population of NY.

60 million people, in a country that even with 328 million has large regions with basically no population.

In other words: those 60 million people were clustered into populations exactly like the current 328 million are.

The land was not really any emptier than it is today, with 5x more people.

60 million people lived in population clusters surrounded by vast regions of empty lands, just like today.

Those clusters followed waterways, shores, lakes, etc.

The same way a population of 328 million doesn't really see themselves as living in vast swatches of empty areas, those 60 million didn't.

In an area that large, the difference in size makes little difference.

So: 60 million people, living where even with 5 times as many there'd still be vast areas where no one lives.

No emptier, in a real sense, than the current land is.

60 million people, who were then killed and starved off down to 5 million.

Americans are living in the aftermath of an apocalypse.

90% of a population killed by brutality and disease, reduced mercilessly toward vanishing, and then their very existence glossed over as if it weren't an apocalypse.

Americans, living in the remnants of that vast genocide, are mostly unaware it even happened.

Their schools teach that the land was empty.

The Spanish Flu killed 675,000 americans in the span of a couple years.

Many of them lived in areas where ten times that number had been killed by smallpox or measles or influenza. Or starvation.

The scale of that genocide, the scale of pain and death, has been carefully erased from history.

The deaths of 55 million people, turned into an abstraction.

Americans, living in the ruins of an apocalypse, barely even notice it.

Even though they're still surrounded by the names of the dead.

A genocide that dwarfs the holocaust, but unremembered, barely documented. Its victims destroyed so thoroughly that little more than their ghosts remain.

And, one that happened so recently that there are photographic records.

This pile of buffalo skulls was made, purposely, to starve millions of people to death.

This is what is left from that massive deliberate famine.

The victims of that mass death event have been erased. Almost no records remain of what they lived through.

Archeologists have to figure out the death toll of that picture by estimation.

It was a genocide mostly without paperwork, and with a few scattered photographs of it in progress.

A largely undocumented apocalypse.

More recent genocides have been better documented. Records remain, paperwork remains, photos remain. You can hear the voices of the victims, know who they were, remember them.

This genocide, though, left little more than ghosts behind.

Inside that genocide are specific atrocities. A million people killed in one year here, 5 million killed over several years there.

So little is left that it's down to archeologists to even estimate when and how many were killed in each event.

Some of those events, in their entirety, where as swift and deadly as the holocaust was.

Some deliberate famines killed the same number of people, almost as quickly. Some virulent outbreaks of european diseases, killed as many almost as quickly.

And it is down to archeologists to piece together what happened, try to estimate how many were killed in this famine or that outbreak.

It's a genocide made more horrifying by how thorough it was. It destroyed even the memory that its victims existed.

More recent genocides left behind far more records, more precise timelines, day by day documentation of who was brutalized, how, and when.

Few approach the scale of that genocide so thorough that it largely erased the fact it even occurred.

Now: take a moment to imagine a single mass death event, just as large as the one whose only record is this.

Except, everyone has cameras documenting the whole thing, minute by minute, with more detailed records than any one historian could learn in their life.

Say that picture is the remaining documentation of a single famine that killed 1 million people.

That's on the scale of how many were murdered in Auschwitz.

One mass death event, on the same scale as more modern ones, except that all that remains is a few photographs.

Take a moment to imagine the deaths of 1 million people, except documented so well that you could track their activity second by second, meter by meter, throughout the whole duration.

A single mass death event, on the scale of that forgotten famine, or Auschwitz, with terabytes of documentation.

A single mass death event on that scale with enough data to allow forensic researchers to place everyone involved second by second, meter by meter.

With literal centuries worth of video footage, from every angle.

Consider: has the deliberate death of 1 million people in the span of a year, ever been recorded with precise enough granularity to pinpoint each victim's location?

Did the Iraq war have that much granularity in its mass death of around 1 million civilians?

The quick, brutal death of 1 million people, recorded in ultra high definition, leaving so much documentation that precise timelines down to the second can be constructed for each, torrents of documentation: not even the Iraq war had that much detail

So, my thanksgiving thread where I say it will be the largest, most well-documented mass death event in history.

It can *easily* result in 1 million deaths.

*And* it will be the first time in history that each of those deaths is accompanied by terabytes of data.

The first mass death event of a million people in which *so much* data remains that just turning it into human readable form will be an effort.

The first mass death event of a million people that involves terabyte-scale records.

Other single mass death events have been larger. Other outbreaks of disease and deliberate cruelty larger.

But none will have been recorded in so much detail.

History has already seen the deaths of a million people erased so thoroughly that barely anything remains to show it happened.

History will now see the opposite: the death of a million people with more precise data than any one person could hope to study.