Historian David Stannard writes that by the year 1769, the destruction of the American aboriginals population down to just one-third of one percent of the total American population of 76 million was the most massive genocide in world history, and "there was, at last, almost no one left to kill."[48] According to anthropologist Russell Thornton, for the American Indians "the arrival of the Europeans marked the beginning of a long holocaust, although it came not in ovens, as it did for the Jews. The fires that consumed North America Indians were the fevers brought on by newly encountered diseases, the flashes of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of "firewater," the flames of villages and fields burned by the scorched-earth policy of vengeful Euro-Americans."[62] David Quammen likened colonial American practices toward Native Americans to those of Australia toward its aboriginal populations, calling both genocide.[63] Some authors, including Holocaust scholar David Cesarani, have argued that United States government policies in furtherance of its so-called Manifest Destiny constituted genocide.[64]