More Population Funnies

This fine video from the American Museum of Natural History takes only a few minutes to watch. It's a fine snapshot of our brief history on the earth.

100,000 to 30,000 BCE*

There's hardly anyone around. Numbers in the tens of thousands? Sprinkled across the northern temperate zone.

15,000 to 10,000 BCE

The beginnings of an up-tick as the weather improves and humans take up agriculture. Gets up to about 5 million.

1700 BCE to 1 CE**

Things really get rolling after the end of the Bronze Age. The first big surge in world population comes between the collapse of the eighteenth century BCE and the year zero (beginning of the use of the Augustinian calendar, typically mischaracterized as 1 A.D.) The humans are almost all in that northern temperate zone, Europe, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China. There are sprinklings of dots (one dot equals one million people) in Africa, North and South America, Indonesia, and Japan. World population in the year 1 CE reaches 170 million.

500 CE

The population rises only a bit, to 177 million people. The distribution remains about the same.

1000 CE

254 million by now, with more dots appearing in Africa and Japan, and dots starting to show up in Russia.

1350 CE

The arrival of the Black Plague! The only really noticeable drop in world population ever to occur sees a drop from 365 million to 340 million over the course of about fifty years.

1700 CE

587 million! A huge bounce-back beginning after the plague thing settled down. The plague directly enabled big advances in science, technology, and the social contract. These enabled profound developments in finance, entrepreneurship, business entities, navigation, bookkeeping, medicine, and education, which in turn led directly to the increases in production and the population.

1800 CE

1 billion people.

1900 CE

One and a half billion.

2020 CE

Almost eight billion.

2100 CE

Projected population, 11 billion. Predicted to level off at this point due to social changes affecting the so called fertility rate. (Really, the rate at which people benefit from procreation or feel like procreating.)

I marvel at their ability to find people who would dare to make predictions for the next one hundred years. Such people must have either the courage of the martyrs or the gall of cat burglars.

*BCE “before common era.”

** CE “common era.” Referring to the years by the former designations of BC (“before Christ”) or AD (anno domini, “year of our lord”) is anachronistic and a bit sad. The year “one” was so called because it was the first year of the use of the Augustinian calendar. It could not have had anything to do with the birth of Joshua, called Jesus by the Romans, because he did not rise to public recognition until decades later, at the age of about thirty. The modern calendar, commissioned to replace another calendar that was not sufficiently precise, worked so well that it is still in use today. The Emperor Augustus added the extra day every four years that was required to adequately mark the passing of a year.