All human beings throughout human history gathered in a single chart

“How many people have ever lived on earth?” Calculate the answer to the question. Very complicated. In 2022, the world is likely to reach a milestone: a population of 8 billion. But this wild increase is a new phenomenon. For thousands of years, fewer people roamed the Earth than would live in an average-sized city today. Given a world population of approximately 7.8 billion, the estimate shows that those living today make up almost 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived.

However, this still begs the same question: how many people have lived so far in the long arc of human history? This is what demographers around the world have been trying to answer for decades.

The answer is complex. For starters, when research began, it was thought that “modern” Homo sapiens (that is, humans who are now more or less like us) first walked on Earth around 50,000 BC. 200,000 BC This major shift in our understanding of Human existence spurred new calculations and resulted in an estimate that approximately 117 billion humans were born on Earth.

A great graphic published in Our World in Data highlights how many people lived in the past and how much of humanity is alive today.

You can view the chart at its maximum resolution.n here.

How was this figure reached? Dudley Poston Jr., a demographer at Texas A&M University, extended the original analysis to 190,000 BC and produced an estimate of approximately 8 billion births between 190,000 BC. and, taking into account the number of Postons of 50,000 BC, the researchers concluded that 117 billion people have been born since 190,000 BC. They also estimated that another 4 billion births by 2050 would increase the number of people who have lived on Earth to 121,000 million.

Of course, calculating the number of people who have ever lived is part science and part art. Demographic data are not available for more than 99% of the human population. Still, we can get a rough idea of ​​this number with some assumptions about population size throughout human history.

Measuring all of humanity requires a precise starting date for when humans… became human. Evolution is a gradual process, so determining the start date of humanity is not an easy task. However, for the purposes of this exercise, demographers Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub used 190,000 BC. C. as a breakpoint.

The evolution of the human population.

There are two opposing points to consider when considering prehistoric humans: Around the chosen start date, the global human cohort was quite small, perhaps as low as 30,000 individuals. Before the modern era, life expectancies were much shorter, so long periods can significantly affect numbers. Considering this context and time frame, demographers estimate that 109 billion people lived and died over the course of 192,000 years. If we add up the number of people alive today, we get 117 billion people who have ever lived.

This means that for every person alive today, there are about 14 people who are no longer with us. “This is 109 billion of us for the civilization we live in. The languages ​​we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use, what we know, we learned from them.” Analyst explained Max Roser of Our World in Data.

What percent of humanity is alive right now?

It is remarkable that such a large proportion of humans are still alive today, especially considering that, when measured over more than a thousand centuries, 7% of all humans who have ever lived are still alive today. However, if we look at the recent global population explosion, it starts to make sense. Looking at the graph above, it is difficult to predict which path humanity will take in the future and how this will affect population growth in the future.

It was only in 2007 that the majority of people started living in cities and in 2018 the majority gained access to the internet. While we may never meet the 109 billion people who laid the foundations of our modern societies, we have never been more interconnected as a species than we are today.