Re: About the distribution of precolumbian human populations.

Thanks for the interesting question Milton. I think that the answer depends on how you define early when you use the term "early humans." I am going to assume that your question pertains to anatomically modern humans (as opposed to archaic human species like Homo neanderthalis, Homo antecessor, or Homo erectus). Let's take a look at how long modern people have lived in the various inhabited regions of the world. You probably know some of this already, but I think that this will put things in perspective. The following table will list the colonized region, the approximate amount of time (as of 2002) that has passed since people arrived at that region (but not since they got sight of it) based on the available evidence, and some pertinent facts about that region, for perspective.

So, in the top section of this table, you can see that all habitable continents had been found by really "early" people more than 10,000 years ago, and from the middle section that most of the large islands had been colonized at least 1000 years ago. In addition, many of these large islands (like New Guinea/Papua New Guinea, Borneo, and Sumatra) were colonized during the really early stage (since people had to cross them to get to Australia).

The last section of the table describes some small or very remote islands that have been discovered and colonized in the last 600 years. The largest of these are found in the arctic to the north of Eurasia and are fairly inhospitable. These (Novaya Zemlya and Svalbard) probably constitute the largest (until recently) uninhabited islands. In comparison, Greenland covers about 2.2 million square kilometers, New Guinea 820,000 square kilometers, Borneo 743,000 square kilometers, and Madagascar 590,000 square kilometers. The temperate islands in the bottom section of the table are all very small and isolated, which explains why no one found them until recently. There are probably several other small habitable islands (e.g. St. Helena and Ascencion Island) that have only recently had human inhabitants, but I think you get the idea.

Overall, I would say that almost all of the hospitable places had been identified and colonized a while ago. For example, the Polynesian people managed to find extremely remote places like Easter Island, so it seems possible that they could have assessed most (if not all) of the islands in the Pacific, taking note of those that they deemed too inhospitable for survival.

So, to answer your question, the largest hospitable land masses that were not colonized relatively early in human history are Madagascar (the fourth largest island in the world), the islands of New Zealand (265,000 square kilometers), and Iceland (103,000 square kilometers), but almost all such regions had been identified by the end of the 15th century.

Thanks for such an interesting question. I had fun learning about some of these remote places (like Kerguelen), and I hope that I've answered your question.