You can probably guess that the number of people currently living on Earth is less than the number of people who have ever lived and died. But have you ever thought about how many people have lost their lives so far?
This idea may seem reasonable, as the human population has increased significantly in the last two centuries, driven by industrialization and advances in agriculture, and the human population has increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to just over 8 billion today. Perhaps at some point in the century we will even think that the population has increased so rapidly that the living outnumber the dead. However, according to the data and estimates we have, this is not possible.
Around 1800 population data became much better. As Wendy Baldwin from the US-based Population Reference Bureau (PRB) stated in an interview with the BBC in 2012; “Once we start writing records, when we do censuses, and when countries start collecting taxes, you start to develop evidence.”
Considering that, as far as we currently know, the first modern humans left Africa 60,000 years ago, there is still a long time for us to rely solely on guesses rather than hard data.
“The average lifespan in Iron Age France (from 800 BC to approximately AD 100) is estimated to have been only 10 or 12 years,” the PRB said in publishing its latest population estimates. “The survival of the species under these conditions The birth rate must be 80 live births per 1000 people. “For comparison, the current high birth rate is approximately 35 to 45 live births per 1,000 population, and this is observed only in sub-Saharan African countries.”
The PRB used population estimates from various points in history and prehistory and applied an assumed birth rate (decreasing over time to reflect a falling birth rate). The method offered a rough estimate of the number of births (and therefore deaths).
B.C. Approximately 117 billion births since 190,000
According to their estimates, B.C. There have been approximately 117 billion births since 190,000 BC. With a simple knowledge of mathematics, we can say that this number is much higher than the 8 billion people alive today.
“One criticism we could make of our results is that our method may underestimate the number of births to some extent,” the researchers write. “An assumption of constant rather than highly fluctuating population growth in the previous period may lead us to underestimate the average population size at that time.”
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