Please be gentle if this is a silly question but its something I was wondering about today.
The human population only really began to increase massively in the past few centuries and the most populous nation on earth is China (closely followed by India I believe) so does that mean that the most common group* of humans in history is the Han Chinese?
In other words if all human history is taken together a person is more likely to have been born Han Chinese than anything else, and female as well because females outnumber males?
*I’m reluctant to use the word ‘race’ because that tends to send threads way off down a track that has been argued many times before
Simply substituting the word “group” for “race” doesn’t really solve the definitional problem. What’s a group? Is “non Han Chinese” a group? That certainly beats “Han Chinese”. Is “negroid” a group? That probably wins too.
According to traditional delineations of ethnic groups, yes.
But that depends on the notion that “Han” is a single ethnic group. How do you determine where to draw the line between what you consider to be two different ethnic groups? Are the Han Chinese really more homogenous than other ethnic groups that are considered distinct?
If alien anthropologists studied humans for a few decades, how might they categorize us?
I was so curious about this that I dug up my own cite.
Do the dead outnumber the living?
“There are currently seven billion people alive today and the Population Reference Bureau estimates that about 107 billion people have ever lived. This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living.”
Wow!
I wasn’t surprised that the dead outnumber the living, but had expected it to be close. Clearly the effect of “very low population in olde tymes” is canceled and totally overwhelmed by the effect of “a very very very long olde tyme”
Setting aside the idea that defining a “single cultural group” is a slippery and arbitrary notion, this does give rise to some interesting considerations in deep history.
A large Han Chinese population has been around for a long while, but back-of-the-envelope calculations don’t increase the total number ever born in (say) the last 1000 years by more than a factor of about 3, so we’re still at the order of magnitude of a few billion.
Now, here are some historical population estimates
A key figure here is an estimated world population of around 5 million in 8,000 BC. I could be wrong, but I can’t think of any civilization since then that could be considered roughly as homogenous as the Han Chinese, and that would come close to numbering in the billions (in total people across time - i.e. population size * time / ~20 year generation time).
The more interesting question is, what about before 8,000 B.C.?
Here we’d have to be looking at a much smaller population, but lasting a much longer time in a state that might be considered a stable culture. A million people for 50,000 years would put us in the billions; or 100,000 people for half a million years. I think I find the latter pair of numbers more plausible than the former, perhaps a long period in our early evolutionary history when not much changed for a very long time.
That’s funny, I’m going “wow” in the completely opposite direction. About one in fifteen people who ever lived are alive now? History is a long-ass time, so that feels like a mindbogglingly high percentage to me to be living now. I knew the figures already, but intuitively it seems to me that it shouldn’t be anywhere near that number.
Yeah. It looks like a bomb went off, doesn’t it? Again: Wow!
If aliens ever visit our planet, I picture them asking us about our history. So we tell them about the Romans, Napoleon and Hitler. Only for them to cut us off about twenty seconds into that, point at that graph, and say: “Yes, yes, all very interesting. But, look, WTF was that?”
A bit of a nit pick, but I’m not sure that the human/chimp divergence point is where you’d start measuring “people”. I’d pick either the beginning of the genus Homo (about 2M years ago) or the beginning of the species H. sapiens (about 200K years ago).
The only thing that distinguishes the human/chimp divergent point is that both species happen to be extant.
It’s impossible. At root, this is the kind of classification problem biologists argue over using concepts from cladistics and phylogenetics, right down to the pre-genetic notions of classification being overturned by PCR and the sequencing revolution. This time, however, those pre-genetic classifications are the ones people have literally fought and died over, and so they’re the ones that people try to fit the new science to, because if the Y-DNA haplogroup doesn’t agree with what the Nineteenth Century phrenologists thought about human populations… and it goes downhill from there.
It gets worse when the old classifications are written into the laws. (Looking at you, NAGPRA.)
The key is not that history is long, but that the population was stable for a significant stretch of that time. If population follows exponential growth, then you’d expect the dead and the living to be comparable in number (at least, if the timescale of the exponential is comparable to the length of a human life), no matter how long we’ve been around.
Looking at that graph, what I notice is not the rapid growth right at the end: That’s what you expect to see from an exponential, and if you looked at any other time frame, you’d see the same thing. The part I notice is the mostly-flat section from about 400 BC to AD 900. And I’d also like to see more detail on the pre-history through 400 BC section, too, because at this scale, it’s impossible to tell if that’s also exponential or if it has flat portions.
See here for a log-scale graph of the last 10,000 years:
and data here, including discussion of deep prehistory:
In deep prehistory, of course, it’s an open question what populations we count. Soon after the human-chimp split at ~5MYA, there was a population ancestral to modern humans that bore little resemblance to us; on the other hand, more recently, there were diverged populations/subspecies/species that bore much greater resemblance to modern humans but were not our ancestors. From a population genetic perspective, only our ancestors matter, but as John Mace mentioned it’s an arbitrary cutoff how far back in history we go.
Also, as we get closer to the human/chimp split, we don’t even now which species is ancestral to us. We think *A. afarensis *is ancestral, but we really don’t know. Any further back than that (~3M years) is guesswork. Of course, there probably weren’t many members of any of those species, so we’re not going to be off by much no matter what we assume.
It occurs to me that life expectancy, not generation time, should be the divisor here, although that doesn’t change the order of magnitude of the estimate.
