In fact we have almost no idea what the human population was, in most areas of the world. And, none at all in the millions of square miles of the Sunda region,

In fact we have almost no idea what the human population was, in most areas of the world. And, none at all in the millions of square miles of the Sunda region, now under water from Java to Viet Nam, and connected to more land where the entirety of the South China Sea and Yellow Sea now are. For many decades anthropologists and archaeologists earnestly insisted the Americas were barely populated, pre-Columbus. Now we have found major earthworks projects in both North and South America that required societies in, at minimum, tens of millions to have built and maintained. We know appallingly little about the recent history of our species beyond ~6000 ya, with only tiny, isolated digs at older sites. A major earthwork in Java, Gunung Padang (previously assumed to be a natural feature because of it size), dated to 22 kya has had excavations halted since 2014.