In the 1980's there was quite a bit of concern over the "population boom" and that the Earth couldn't possibly support the number of people we would have on the planet in the year 2000.
Well, science plodded forward, and crop yields raised significantly, and shipping became cheap and easy, and ... well, here we are today eating bananas from Chile, and Ethiopians aren't starving any more, and pretty much everyone can be a picky eater.
One part of this line of thinking was the oft-repeated (but never sourced) comment that "more people are alive today than have ever existed on the planet."
This turns out to be colossally wrong.
Which I find somewhat comforting, actually. It feels kinda good to be just somewhere in the crowd, rather than the fat kid holding one end of the teeter-totter on the ground.
This author also did a followup article where he tried to establish, roughly, how many skeletons are there?
Perhaps it's a by-product of education at the time, but I've never heard of these. Not once was it mentioned in my Human Geography classes in HS (both times I took it, before and after the referenced study). All the more assuring, the survey course in anthropology last semester gave the impression those words were vastly wrong. Though, I do have to admit, I had to re-read the article a few times to understand the difference in diction referred to.