History
How Many Humans Have Ever Lived?
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How Many Humans Have Ever Lived?
In 2022, the world will likely hit a momentous milestone—a population of eight billion.
Of course, this dramatic increase in the world’s human population is a relatively new phenomenon. For many thousands of years, there were fewer people roaming the Earth than would live in a mid-sized city today.
But this does raise an interesting question, though: over the long arc of human history, how many people have ever lived?
The unique and powerful visualization above, from the team at Our World in Data, highlights how many humans have ever lived, and how much of humanity is currently alive today.
Quantifying Our Ancestors
How many humans came before us? This is the question demographers like Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have attempted to answer.
Quantifying all of humanity requires a firm starting date for when humans became, well, human. Evolution is a gradual process, so figuring out the start date for humankind is no easy task. For the purposes of this exercise, however, the two demographers used 190,000 BCE as the cutoff.
There are two opposing points to consider when thinking about prehistoric humans:
- Around the chosen start date, the global cohort of humans was quite small—perhaps as low as only 30,000 individuals.
- Before the modern era, lifespans were much shorter, so long stretches of time can actually influence numbers drastically.
With this context and timeframe in mind, the demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years. If we add the number of people alive today, we get 117 billion humans that have ever lived.
This means that for every person alive today, there are approximately 14 people who are no longer with us.
It is these 109 billion people we have to thank for the civilization that we live in. The languages we speak, the food we cook, the music we enjoy, the tools we use – what we know we learned from them. –Max Roser, Our World in Data
How Much of Humanity is Currently Alive Today?
When considering that 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today, especially when measuring across more than a thousand centuries, it’s remarkable that such a large portion of humans are currently living.
If we chart the recent global population explosion though, it begins to make sense.
Looking at the chart above, it’s hard to predict which path humanity will go down in the future, and how that will affect future population growth.
It was only in 2007 that the majority of humans began to live in cities, and in 2018 that the majority gained access to the internet. While we’ll never meet the 109 billion humans who laid the foundation for our modern societies, we’ve never been more connected as a species.
What will we do with our time in the top of the hour glass?
As noted on the graphic, this is an updated adaptation of a 2013 visualization by Oliver Uberti.
This article was published as a part of Visual Capitalist's Creator Program, which features data-driven visuals from some of our favorite Creators around the world.
Economy
Visualizing Global Commodity Production in the 1920s
We break down detailed historic graphics in this edition of Vintage Viz.
Visualizing Global Commodity Production in the 1920s
This map is the latest in our Vintage Viz series, which presents historical visualizations along with the context needed to understand them.
The year was 1927. Art deco and surrealism were making their debut, the Jazz Age was in full swing, and depending on where you lived, you called this decade either roaring (U.S.), golden (Germany), or even crazy (France).
The second decade of the 20th century was also a period of rapid economic expansion, as Fordism and mass consumer culture took hold in the years following World War I. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the 1927 edition of Prof. Hickmann’s Universal Geographical and Statistical Atlas.
Published in German by the Austrian publisher G. Freytag & Berndt, the atlas contains 80 pages of statistics, charts, and visualizations on a range of themes. In this edition of Vintage Viz, we take a look at just eight of those pages, which cover global commodity production.
Translations: Sprechen Sie Deutsche?
To help out those of us who don’t read German, we’ve included translations of the major content below; just click to expand the items.
Agricultural Production
Click on graphics to view them in high resolution.
Translations: Produktion I
Translations: Produktion II
Produktion I covers land-use (Bodenverwertung in Prozenten des Gesamtbodens) by country. Finland, with its vast tracts of boreal forest, had the largest share of woodlands at 61% of total land coverage. According to 2021 figures from the World Bank, Finland’s forests have actually grown since then, now covering 73.7% of the country. France had the highest proportion of arable land, at 56%, while Norway, with its rugged northern geography, had the largest share of “unproductive” land at 70%.
Turning to livestock, the biggest producer was British India (then a colony), with 197 million heads of horse, cattle, sheep, and pigs. In a close second was the U.S., with 188 million head. Note that livestock statistics don’t all come from the same year.
Grains and Potatoes, Beer and Wine
Click on graphics to view them in high resolution.
Translations: Produktion III
Translations: Produktion IV
On Produktion III, we see that the U.S. was an agricultural powerhouse, producing the largest amounts of most grains, except for rye where the U.S.S.R. was first, and potatoes where Germany was top spud. The bottom visualization shows how surplus grain moved from exporting agricultural producers (Argentina, Canada, the U.S., etc…) to grain importing nations, including the UK and Germany.
On Produktion IV, we have the production of wine and beer, depicted as stacks of barrels. Perhaps it’s no surprise that France edged out Italy as the top wine producer in 1923, while the UK was just ahead of Germany for first place in beer production at 30 million hectoliters (a hectoliter is 100 liters).
Wool and Silk, Oil and Quicksilver
Click on graphics to view them in high resolution.
Translations: Produktion V
Translations: Produktion VI
On Produktion V we have textiles, including silk production. Historically, the cultivation of silk was restricted to China, where it was guarded as a state secret. The story goes that two sixth-century monks smuggled silkworm eggs out of the country hidden in a bamboo pole and presented them to the Byzantine court of Justinian I. Eventually, the secret made its way to the Arabs, then to Italy and later France by returning Crusaders.
Perhaps most interesting on Produktion VI is the breakdown of oil producers. One hundred years ago, the top producer was the U.S., a position that it has recently retaken thanks to the shale revolution. Figures are presented in millions of hectoliters but converted into barrels, the U.S produced just over 753,000 barrels in 1923. To put that in perspective, the U.S. produced 21.4 million barrels of oil every day in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Metals and Gems, Coal and Coke
Click on graphics to view them in high resolution.
Translations: Produktion VII
Translations: Produktion VIII
On Produktion VII and VIII, we have a breakdown of global mining output for a variety of strategic and precious metals. Back then, South Africa was the world’s largest gold producer at 285 metric tons, as well as the top diamond producer (2 million carats), while Mexico was 1923’s largest silver producer.
Strategic metals, on the other hand, were produced mainly by Western industrialized countries of the day. The U.S., which had overtaken the UK as the world’s largest economy following WWI, was the largest producer of pig iron and steel, iron ore, coke, and coal and lignite. The UK only maintained its lead in the production of gas coke.
A Last Gasp Before a Fall
The atlas presents a snapshot of a world on the cusp of the Great Depression, and if we looked at a version published just a few short years later it would likely show a remarkably different picture. Instead of a time of economic growth and increased exports, it was one of unemployment, isolationism, and eventually, clouded by war.
But in 1927, the Goldene Zwanziger Jahre—the Golden Twenties as they were called in Germany—were still going strong.
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