The population size of “pre-contact” Hispaniola would continue to be a contested issue until the present day, not least because of its profound emotional and moral resonance in light of the destruction of that world. The current population of Haiti and Dominican Republic is 22 million. Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish monk and colonist who became the first chronicler of the human disaster that unfolded in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, estimated a far larger number: three million to four million. Was this figure accurate? It soon was a matter of dispute. He estimated the population at 1.1 million people. A few years later his brother Bartholomew, who also traveled to the Americas, reported that Hispaniola had a large population whose labor and land could be put to the advantage of the Spanish crown. After he returned to Spain he reported that he had encountered islands rich in gold. In 1492, Christopher Columbus touched land for the first time in the Americas, reaching the Bahamas, Hispaniola (present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) and eastern Cuba. Patterson is a sociologist at Harvard with expertise in the Caribbean. Reich is a geneticist at Harvard who specializes in the study of ancient DNA. New research delivers surprising findings about Indigenous people in the region before contact with Europeans.ĭr. Geneticist David Reich’s new finding is that there were never many Caribbean islanders.Īncient DNA Is Changing How We Think About the Caribbean Occasionally you see a mestizo-looking islander, such as singer Jennifer Lopez, but not many. Most people from the Caribbean Islands look like white, black, or in-between, while most people from the Latin American mainland look white, Amerindian, or in-between, with blacker people mostly seen along the coasts.