Alfred Radcliffe-Brown

I think the anthropologists were always interested in it, even though they didn't know exactly what to call it.

But you read some of those studies of kinship, uh, from the 1930s, 1940s, even before that, 1920s, some of the stuff of R- Radcliffe Brown.

It's, it's clearly...

So I think that the interesting thing about social networks is that it's not a niche field anymore.

For decades, historical records relied on estimates that placed the pre-colonial population between 250,000 and 1 million people.

The most influential figure came from anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe Brown in the 1930s.

He estimated a population of only 250,000 to 300,000 people.

However, his calculations failed to account for the devastating impacts of introduced diseases and frontier violence that had already decimated communities before official records began.

Where did that number come from and how reliable is it?

Yeah, well, it's mainly from a bloke named Radcliffe Brown, who used some very sort of back of the envelope calculations and with the available tech and data at the time and came up with, you know, 250, 300,000.

But he was very explicit about saying that it was probably an underestimate, mainly because a lot of the impacts of colonialism had already occurred in many of the regions he was looking into.

So even by his own acknowledgement, it was an underestimate by how much he didn't know.

This figure is much larger than the estimate of 300,000 which has shaped public understanding for the past century.

The old estimate, published by anthropologist Alfred Reginald Radcliffe Brown in 1930, was based largely on observations made after disease, dispossession and violence had already devastated indigenous communities.

Using three methods that do not depend on colonial era headcounts, we calculated a median population of 2.22 million people in 1788, with a likely range roughly between 1 and 4 million.

Our work is published in Nature Human Behavior.