Can anyone think of any incident in recorded history that has killed off 10% of a continent's population, besides the Bubonic Plague?
I can think of a few possible parallels:
1. Smallpox's effect on indigenous people in the Americas. I have no numbers, but by historical accounts it was absolutely devastating.
2. The 1918 Flu Pandemic. Not all regions lost as much as 10% of their population, but some lost more. Pacific island nations lost as much as 20% of their populations. In India, 5% of the population died, about 17 million people. Globally, somewhere between 3% and 6% of the world's total population is estimated to have perished.
3. There are many catastrophic examples of famine throughout history, too many to list. Some exceptional examples:
*The Russian famine of 1601-1603 that killed as many as one third of the Tsar's subjects.
*The Irish Potato famine of 1845-1852 that killed an estimated 1 million or 12.5% of the population and, combined with emigration, caused the total population of the island to fall 20-25%
Admittedly, most of these are not continental in scale, but many of them were far more devastating than what's happened to Dwilight in the context of the regions in which they occurred. Entire civilizations have been destroyed or brought down by famine throughout history.
4. China's Great Leap Forward led to the deaths by famine of an estimated 5% of the population, along with millions of additional deaths resulting from government purges and natural disasters. The estimated total is 7% of a population of 600 million.
5. The Soviet Union experienced a drop of 13% in population between 1941 and 1946. This was a combination of wartime deaths and the results of purges, famine and disease.
