3 ms·

what are the error bands on this?

• jcranmer 3y ago
  Doing some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, I wouldn't be shocked for any value between 100 and 200 billion. You end up with estimates of high single billions for all humans pre-Neolithic (pre-urban settlement)--the error bars are very high, but it doesn't make a large difference in the grand scheme of things because it's the smallest component. For urban settlement essentially before good, sustained record keeping (think ~10kya to 1kya), you're looking at several tens of billions of people, with several tens of billions more in the era of modern record keeping. Right now, it takes about 6 years or so for a billion babies to be born. (For my part, I think the estimate they give here is on the low end. I don't know the sources they're using, but I've generally observed that estimates of pre-modern demography have generally trended upwards in more recent scholarship.)
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  "Error bands" aren't really calculable for something like this, because a lot of it is as much definitions as anything else. As the article points out, there is a lot of uncertainty just when we say the first "modern home sapien" "counts" as a person.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    If I wanted to include some weird little subspecies though, or even expanded it out to H. erectus... surely they don't add much to the total. Prior to the invention of agriculture, they could never achieve high population densities, so "success" would mean what, hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe?
    • nonameiguess 3y ago
      Homo erectus existed for almost 2 million years, somewhere around five times as long as homo sapiens so far. So there may have been more than you think overall, even if there were never many living at the same time.