So even though it's shockingly high on the present-day population quiz, it's even more shocking to realise that Bangladesh has actually been dropping off! It used to be much higher.
Well Google currently thinks that the population of Bangladesh is about 9 times what it is in this quiz, whereas China & India are only about 4-5 times...
If you've ever played the "Most Populous Modern-Day Countries by Century" you will notice that Bangladesh was even higher on the list before--3rd place in 1000 AD and 4th place in 1500 AD!
These attempts to calculate populations in areas that had no statistics seem to rely on a lot of speculation. The numbers for such places as Nigeria, D.R. Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc are not very reliable. Probably the only places that had reliable statistics at that time were the UK, France, Germany, and maybe Spain and Italy.
The directions specify the modern day countries.They may have all been one country, but the area that is now Pakistan counts for Pakistan, the area that is now Bangladesh counts fro Bangladesh, etc.
Probably not enough reliable sources for natives. This country's growth in population is based a lot on immigration after world wars and during the times when US has been young country without some or most of current territory, of course not everyone necessarily wanted to become an immigrant in US..
The 1800 US census put the population at 5.3 million. But, I find it pretty unlikely that there were 1.7 million natives east of the Mississippi (the number required to make it on this list). They had been through a few hundred years since Spanish contact, so plenty of time for the European diseases to spread and wipe out a large portion of the population. And the region never had a large-scale civilization like those in Mesoamerica or the Andes.
They definitely had had large scale civilization as the Mississippian Culture or Cahokia shows, it had just collapsed hundreds of years before contact for unrelated reasons.
Cahokia collapsed well before european arrival, true, but there were still fairly large-scale Mississippian towns and villages up through the De Soto expedition in the mid-1500s as accounts from that expedition describe several settlements with temple mounds and populations in the low thousands. That particular expedition likely marked the final population collapse of large-scale indigenous settlements in the area, as it corresponded with a disease outbreak in the Southeast and in the Mississippi valley, not to mention the looting and killing De Soto did as he marched from town to town. Even so, there is a fairly clear continuation of culture between some regional Mississippian subcultures and modern tribes like the Muskogee, Natchez, and Caddo. There are accounts of the Natchez at least living in walled villages with central temple mounds up into the mid 1700s.
https://www.jetpunk.com/quizzes/modern-day-countries-most-populous-by-century