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?