Why was the Nephite Population so Low?

Agricultural civilizations normally have a huge population advantage on the surrounding hunters and horticulturalists.

I earlier suggested that the Nephite agricultural package may have been poorly adapted to the area.  Not impossible to grow, but marginal.  And that corn maize was a superior crop introduced from elsewhere but with a complex of idolatrous practices that went along with it.

This would neatly explain why Nephite numbers remained small and also why defections to idolatry were so common.  The later Lamanites may just have had a culture that in material terms seemed to require a lot less work.  Even during the European settlement of North America, a number of Anglos went tribal because it seemed to be a lot less work.

However, the Book of Mormon claims that their crops thrived.  For an ordinary historical document, we could dismiss this out of  hand as cope and jingoism.  Since the Book of Mormon is also a sacred text, we might hesitate to do that.

So here’s a new theory, inspired by recent reading about the settlement of North America.  Disease.

Everybody knows that when the Europeans arrived the Indians died like flies from all the introduced diseases.  That may or may not have happened with the Nephites and the locals they encountered.  The founder Nephite population was probably too small to have introduced a lot of disease.  But even one disease in a virgin field epidemic could have done enough damage that it explains why the founder Lehites (Nephites and Lamanites both) were able to get on top of the locals pretty quickly.  Diseases tend to badly disrupt local political arrangements.

But what is less known is that a lot of the initial wave of European settlers died like flies also.  And the more distinct the New World climate, the more they died.

More than half of the Virginia settlers died of disease.

This continued for decades for new arrivals.  They called it seasoning and they thought the new man or woman had about a 50% chance of lasting out their first year.

It may have been more than just acclimatization, their may have been some difficulty at the racial or ethnic level.  Virginia infant mortality rates continued to be higher than back home.

If  the Nephites had a high mortality rate and higher infant mortality rates, it might account for their population problems.  What would Jamestown have looked like, or Plymouth Rock, if there were no more settlers?