Indigenous peoples in Brazil  Indigenous peoples in Brazil () or Indigenous Brazilians () once comprised an estimated 2000 tribes and nations inhabiting what is now the country of Brazil, prior to the European contact around 1500. Christopher Columbus thought he had reached the East Indies, but Portuguese Vasco da Gama had already reached India via the Indian Ocean route, when Brazil was discovered by Portugal. Nevertheless, the word ("Indians") was by then established to designate the people of the New World and continues to be used in the Portuguese language to designate these people, while a person from India is called in order to distinguish the two. At the time of European contact, some of the Indigenous people were traditionally semi-nomadic tribes who subsisted on hunting, fishing, gathering and migrant agriculture. Many tribes suffered extinction as a consequence of the European settlement and many were assimilated into the Brazilian population. The Indigenous population was decimated by European diseases, declining from a pre-Columbian high of 2 to 3 million to some 300,000 , distributed among 200 tribes. By the 2010 IBGE census, 817,000 Brazilians classified themselves as Indigenous. A 1985 linguistic survey found 188 living indigenous languages with 155,000 total speakers. On January 18, 2007, FUNAI reported 67 remaining uncontacted tribes in Brazil, up from 40 known in 2005. With this addition Brazil passed New Guinea, becoming the country with the largest number of uncontacted peoples in the world. Questions about the original settlement of the Americas has produced a number of hypothetical models. The origins of these Indigenous people are still a matter of dispute among archaeologists. Anthropological and genetic evidence indicates that most Amerindian people descended from migrant people from North Asia (Siberia) who entered the Americas across the Bering Strait or along the western coast of North America in at least three separate waves. In Brazil, particularly, most native tribes who were living in the land by 1500 are thought to be descended from the first Siberian wave of migrants, who are believed to have crossed the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, between 13,000 and 17,000 years before the present. A migrant wave would have taken some time after initial entry to reach present-day Brazil, probably entering the Amazon River basin from the Northwest. (The second and third migratory waves from Siberia, which are thought to have generated the Athabaskan, Aleut, Inuit, and Yupik people, apparently did not reach farther than the southern United States and Canada, respectively.)