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"During Taiwan's early history, the island was sparsely populated by Austronesian aboriginals". Does anyone have any data about the population density of Taiwan prior to immigration from China? Readin (talk) 22:16, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
Actually no. I put the "dubious" tag up because I thought the sentence should be removed if we couldn't find a reliable source to back it up. I was suspicious because being American I'm aware of some misconceptions about American Indians and their population density prior to 1492. When the Spanish arrived, they brought diseases that decimated the American Indians. They didn't know they were doing it, of course. The spread of disease far outpaced the spread of exploration and settlement, so that by the time the Europeans started documenting the midwest and great plains, the culture and population density was completely different from what it had been.
I don't know what the population density of Taiwan was prior to the arrival of the Dutch and the later arrival of immigrants from China, but we should not assume it was sparse without a good reference to back that claim up. Readin (talk) 21:30, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
