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. It is still common to hear that more people are alive today than have ever lived. Or an even more extreme claim: that 75 percent of everyone who ever walked the earth is living today.
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.
Baghdad under the Abbasids? 1.2 million people. Seeing inklings of this in my lecture about the Crusades. The professor is fresh off the plane from U.K. Previous African and Asian history courses painted a much broader view than the assumptions that were made yesterday about the spread of Islam.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.