> Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). [...] There were perhaps 230 million of us on Ear

> Homo sapiens have roamed the Earth for roughly 300,000 years, give or take (no one left a diary back then). [...] There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end. I think those numbers on their own are already interesting. They give us a picture just how unusual the present time really is - or even most of recorded history. Cleopatra was living in the first century BC, so very roughly 2000 years ago. So for the ~298.000 years before (or ~99.3% of human history), there were less humans on earth than are living in the US today. Only in the last 0.7% have we ever gotten close to a billion, then surpassed it and reached 8 billion today. So explosive population growth has absolutely been real, it just used to happen at timescales that are not easy for us to access.