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Genuinely interesting, but I take it with a good dose of default skepticism.
What are you sceptical about? This is just a visualization of established scientific knowledge.
I suppose I’d call myself more curious than sceptical - I could look shit up and I can’t be bothered - but how do you define when humans became humans? I imagine its an estimate based from anthropological and fossil records and stuff
They’re just taking an educated guess. Based on fossil records we’ve estimated that homo sapiens sapiens emerged about 200k-300k years ago. I’m not sure if they assumed a middle ground estimate of 250k years here, but it was probably something like that. If we’re measuring by years, the margin of error is huge, but when we’re estimating the total number of people, it doesn’t matter that much, because there were so few of us for so long.
Data and methods, please. Why are you not skeptical?
Sources and attribution at the bottom Daddio.
Based on the historical estimates from Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub (Population Reference Bureau) and the UN Population Division. Based on a design by Oliver Uberti OurWorldinData.org - Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. Licensed under CC-BY by the author Max Roser
The visualization is strange for this because the hour glass implies that the is a finite number of humans that can live but at the same time it is refilled from the top continously.
What happens in a billion years will it overflow?
Am I the only one with this problem?
Then God will turn it over and it starts going backwards. All the dead people will be born again in reverse order, it’s gonna be real weird.
You are here
dang, how does it know, that’s crazy
