When was the 50 billionth human born?
score:36
Data published by the demographer Carl Haub and Dr. Toshiko Kaneda in How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? on the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) website suggests that the 50 billionth person would have been born around 130 AD / CE. This can be seen by looking at the column 'Number Ever Born' in the table below:
Image source: Population Reference Bureau (PRB). Table data sources: Toshiko Kaneda and Genevieve Dupuis, '2017 World Population Data Sheet' (Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau, 2017); United Nations Population Division, 'World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision' (New York: United Nations, 2017).
In 130 AD:
- Hadrian was emperor of Rome.
- The Han dynasty ruled in China.
- The Kushan Empire was around 100 years old and had about another 245 years to go.
- Claudius Ptolemy, Greek mathematician, astronomer, geographer and astrologer, was probably in his 30s.
- Galen, Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher, was an infant and would have been close to being the 50 billionth person born.
Carl Haub originally made these calculations in 1995 to dispel the myth that
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived
(His data estimates showed that "those alive in 2002 constituted only about 6 percent", far from the 'myth' of more than half.)
He and Toshiko Kaneda updated the data in 2002 and 2011, conceding that their approach is (of necessity) "semi-scientific". On the methods used in their calculations, the authors say that
calculating the number of people who have ever lived is part science and part art. No demographic data exist for 99 percent of the span of human existence. Still, with some assumptions about prehistoric populations, we can get a rough idea of this historic number...
They take 50,000 BC as the starting date:
Fixing a time when the human race actually came into existence is not straightforward. Hominids walked the Earth as early as several million years ago, and various ancestors of Homo sapiens appeared at least as early as 700,000 B.C. According to the United Nations Determinants and Consequences of Population Trends, modern Homo sapiens may have appeared about 50,000 B.C.
This corresponds "to the start of the Upper Paleolithic" and "the emergence of full behavioral modernity" ("behavioral and cognitive traits that distinguishes current Homo sapiens from other anatomically modern humans, hominins, and primates.").
The articles How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? and Do Living People Outnumber the Dead? go into details on how the estimates were arrived at (the details are a bit lengthy to include here...).
The margin of error for the birth of the 50 billionth person who ever lived is fairly large; Hadrian may not have been born or Galen may have been dead and buried rather than an infant, but the Kushan empire and the Han dynasty cover considerably longer time periods.
More post
- 📝 What would be a textbook example of Germans attacking a small defending force in the rubble of a village?
- 📝 What happened to the French royal navy during the french-revolution?
- 📝 Was COMECON involved in economic imperialism and if so, to what extent?
- 📝 What media did Irenaeus used to write his letters?
- 📝 What did NATO AFCENT commander Bennecke do during World War 2?
- 📝 What's the point of the transept?
- 📝 Was India's independence inevitable after Cripps Mission?
- 📝 How can a megalith be dated via the C14 method?
- 📝 Gregório Amúrrio: dates of birth and death
- 📝 Is Josephus account of destruction of Temple considered reliable?
- 📝 Identify the country, service and historical context of this bright red dress uniform, and ideally the nature of the medals. Relationship to Taiwan?
- 📝 Regarding the Columbian exchange, why did the ecological factors surrounding the re-connecting of the continents favor the Old World?
- 📝 Why did Columbus cross the mid-Atlantic instead of exploring from Greenland?
- 📝 Why so many old remains of different animals and almost no remains of humans
- 📝 How much time did people have to take shelter during the Blitz in 1940-41?
- 📝 Has a battering ram been used to breach a gate?
- 📝 Why do some sections of Great Wall of China seem to be bidirectional?
- 📝 During the Indian removal were native Americans fed rotten food and taken through diseased areas?
- 📝 Help identifying an old bayonet
- 📝 How was the term "Mandate of Heaven" used during the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties?
- 📝 Why did Herzl's attempt to come to a political agreement with the Ottoman rulers of Palestine fail?
- 📝 Hitler And Nazism - Did Hitler ever express remorse over killing?
- 📝 Map of/Measure of conflicted areas throughout history
- 📝 What machine technology did the Egyptians have to build the great pyramids?
- 📝 Did significant numbers of Japanese officers escape prosecution during the Tokyo Trials?
- 📝 How did the civilian population of Nazi Germany react to Operation Overlord?
- 📝 Is this old oval copper coin Chinese?
- 📝 Who were the first two democratically elected leaders of Russia?
- 📝 How detailed were American Civil War medical records of the types of diseases that various soldiers had?
- 📝 Help needed to identify this badge, probably from World War Two
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 When was the 50 billionth human born?
- 📝 When was the first recorded example of a race competition in human history?
- 📝 When was the deadliest year in human history in absolute terms?
- 📝 Why did Hitler attack the Soviet Union when he was still busy fighting the United Kingdom?
- 📝 Why did archery not make a comeback when armor was phased out in the 18th century?
- 📝 Did it take 3 minutes to reload a musket when the second amendment to the US constitution was ratified?
- 📝 Where did Hitler get the funds to invest in economic development programs such as the autobahn when the German economy was in a depression?
- 📝 How and when was the modern company ownership structure invented?
- 📝 When the Portuguese began the exploration of the West African Coast, did they believe the Indian Ocean was an enclosed sea?
- 📝 When was the last time a reigning monarch personally participated in battle?
- 📝 Was the Dutch State independent when the Dutch East India Company was founded?
- 📝 How likely is it that any non-Celtic language was spoken in the British Isles when the Romans invaded?
- 📝 When and why was the samurai class abolished?
- 📝 What / When was the first use of concentration camps in history?
- 📝 When was the last documented occasion that Arab or Ottoman slave traders abducted people from Europe?
- 📝 What was lost when the British burned the White House in 1814?
- 📝 When was Jerusalem destroyed by the Babylonians?
- 📝 Before the Land Bridge Theory, how was human presence in the Americas explained?
- 📝 When was the American War of Independence first called a 'Revolution'?
- 📝 Was the "natural born citizen" requirement for the President inserted into the US Constitution by Alexander Hamilton's enemies?
- 📝 When was the last cavalry charge?
- 📝 When was the concept of "weekly day off" first introduced in Indian Subcontinent?
- 📝 When was the change from kalends, ides and nones to numbers
- 📝 When was it discovered that the stars are not all lying on the same plane?
- 📝 Where was Carl Sagan working on a plan to detonate a nuke on the Moon? Where was he applying when he leaked it?
- 📝 When was the last time (if ever) an elector was faithless in US presidential elections?
- 📝 When was tofu invented? Was it specifically for vegetarian consumption from the beginning?
- 📝 When was the first electrical intra-battlefield communication?
- 📝 When was the first time Rome was mentioned in outside records (and specifically, in Greek ones)?
- 📝 When was the last promotion in the British Peerage?
