 Contemporary historians debate the legitimacy of calling the quasi-disparition of the Amerindians a "genocide".Estimates of pre-Columbian population have ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons; in 1976, geographer William Denevan derived a "consensus count" of about 54 million people.David Stannard has argued that "The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world", with almost 100 million Amerindians killed in what he calls the "American Holocaust".