As a case example of the depopulation of indigenous societies by European settlement, Australia stands in succession to the far more substantial one of North America and large parts of South America. In all cases, however, the scale of this depopulation has been disregarded because of long-held views of the very sparse use of natural resources by hunter gatherers. This, in turn, appears to be deeply rooted in the non-Malthusian view of hunter-gatherer economies. If scarcity was not a significant problem, hunter gatherers must have used resources very lightly and hence populations cannot have been large enough to stress natural resources. In the United States, population estimates by Kroeber and somewhat more generally by Mooney during the 1920s set the precontact Amerindian populations at very low levels — for the United States and Canada at approximately a million persons. Following this tradition, the long-held view of precontact Aboriginal numbers in Australia at 250–300,000 (but possibly more) derives from Radcliffe-Brown in an official estimate published in 1930.

Both sets of low numbers have been challenged relatively recently. In the United States, the main original challenger was Dobyns during the 1960s, followed by Zubrowe (1990: 754–65). Dobyns' revisions suggested precontact American numbers at 10–15 times the Mooney–Kroeber estimates and Dobyns has expanded this re-estimation to propose very large pre-Columbian populations (100–130 millions) for the whole American hemisphere.