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It's a factoid I've always grown up with, as well as the Malthusian conclusion we'd all be either pushing up daisies or licking The Great Humungous' boots by the time we were 40. It has that truthiness to it that, combined with the fact that ferreting out the actual data is tedious and boring, tends to make it an unassailable fact. You also have to keep in mind that Western thought is tediously European and if London had a population of only 50,000 while Henry VIII was busy making history than obviously there was nobody on earth back then duh. I mean, Troy could barely have fielded a AAA varsity football team. Baghdad under the Abbasids? 1.2 million people.