Sheril KirshenbaumJul 15, 2023

About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.

This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.

Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science #art

Show threadEsslar2
@Sheril Oh, this is so good! I've always wondered about this, how many people have lived but the trouble is, what year, century, or millennia does h. sapiens become h. sapiens?
Jul 15, 2023 at 2:48pmWeb
Show threadWm.sonJul 15, 2023

@flyhigh @Sheril@mastodon.

Thousands of years before agriculture, is my estimate.

Show threadclacke: exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛Jul 16, 2023

@flyhigh @Sheril en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimate… starts at 50 k years ago and gets to a similar figure, 100+ G people.

It also says at 200 k years ago there were about 200 k humans. If they gave birth to 10x as many kids as an affluent country today, that would be 40 k people born each year.

If we pretend that was stable from 300 k years ago to 50 k years ago that's 4 G people every 100 k years, so that's the difference if you move between 100 k years ago, 200 k years ago etc as the cutoff. Speciation is said to have been 100 k – 300 k years ago.

I believe at some point there was a bottleneck when humans almost went extinct and were down to 2 k people, so the handwaving above should be a high estimate.

Estimates of historical world population - Wikipedia

Show threadEsslar2Jul 16, 2023
@clacke @Sheril This is very good and I will look into it further. 300k years ago seems to be a reasonable start point. I've heard about the bottleneck you bring up and will also get into this some more. I was unaware it may have been such a tiny population. Thanks!