# Has the most common human been Han Chinese? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 21, 2017, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952 "2017-04-21T22:59:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Atomic\_Alex](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/atomic_alex/32/175_2.png) [@Atomic\_Alex](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Atomic_Alex)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/1 "2017-04-21T22:59:12Z")
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 Thanks in advance 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/2 "2017-04-21T23:12:32Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/3 "2017-04-21T23:26:18Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/4 "2017-04-21T23:31:14Z")
Human population really took off recently, but we also existed for a long time at a more stable population level. The dead far outnumber the living. ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [April 21, 2017, 11:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/5 "2017-04-21T23:57:58Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Human population really took off recently, but we also existed for a long time at a more stable population level. The dead far outnumber the living. I was so curious about this that I dug up my own cite. [Do the dead outnumber the living?](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579) “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” ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/6 "2017-04-22T00:05:06Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > I was so curious about this that I dug up my own cite. > > [Do the dead outnumber the living?](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16870579) > “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” Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 12:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/7 "2017-04-22T00:09:50Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Human population really took off recently, but we also existed for a long time at a more stable population level. The dead far outnumber the living. 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 > **[How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?](https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/)** > > The global population milestone of 8 billion people represents nearly 7% of the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/8 "2017-04-22T03:09:03Z")
> [@minor7flat5](#): > > 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” 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. ---
**Author:** ![Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/arrogance_ex_machina/32/192_2.png) [@Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arrogance_Ex_Machina)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 3:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/9 "2017-04-22T03:47:14Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > 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. [This picture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#/media/File:Population_curve.svg) shows it pretty clearly. ---
**Author:** ![Don\_t\_Panic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/don_t_panic/32/398_2.png) [@Don\_t\_Panic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Don_t_Panic)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/10 "2017-04-22T04:09:51Z")
> [@Arrogance\_Ex\_Machina](#): > > [This picture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation#/media/File:Population_curve.svg) shows it pretty clearly. 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?_” ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/11 "2017-04-22T04:29:41Z")
> [@Martian Bigfoot](#): > > 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. These would be the approximate numbers for the long-ass period before the last 10,000 years or so: Human-chimp divergence ~5 million years ago. Arithmetic mean population size a few hundred thousand. Generation time ~20 years. That gives a total number of individuals of the order of 100 billion. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/12 "2017-04-22T05:14:33Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > These would be the approximate numbers for the long-ass period before the last 10,000 years or so: > > Human-chimp divergence ~5 million years ago. > Arithmetic mean population size a few hundred thousand. > Generation time ~20 years. > > That gives a total number of individuals of the order of 100 billion. 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. ---
**Author:** ![Lucas\_Jackson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lucas_jackson/32/303_2.png) [@Lucas\_Jackson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lucas_Jackson)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/13 "2017-04-22T05:54:39Z")
> [@markn\_1](#): > > 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. And the OP even tried to stave off this stuff. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/14 "2017-04-22T07:16:25Z")
> [@White SIFL](#): > > And the OP even tried to stave off this stuff. 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.) ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/15 "2017-04-22T12:23:58Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/16 "2017-04-22T12:52:24Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > …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: > **[Prehistoric demography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleodemography)** > > Prehistoric demography, palaeodemography or archaeological demography is the study of human and hominid demography in prehistory. > More specifically, palaeodemography looks at the changes in pre-modern populations in order to determine something about the influences on the lifespan and health of earlier peoples.\[citation needed\] Reconstructions of ancient population sizes and dynamics are based on bioarchaeology, ancient DNA, and inference from modern population genetics.\[citation needed\] > Skelet... and data here, including discussion of deep prehistory: > **[Estimates of historical world population | Deep prehistory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates#Deep_prehistory)** > > As a general rule, the confidence of estimates on historical world population decreases for the more distant past. Robust population data exist only for the last two or three centuries. Until the late 18th century, few governments had ever performed an accurate census. In many early attempts, such as in Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire, the focus was on counting merely a subset of the population for purposes of taxation or military service. Published estimates for the 1st century ("AD 1") Es... 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. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/17 "2017-04-22T16:16:37Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/18 "2017-04-22T16:27:14Z")
Given that the expected shape is exponential, not power-law, what would be most useful would be a graph logarithmic in population but linear in time. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/19 "2017-04-22T16:38:05Z")
> [@Riemann](#): > > …Human-chimp divergence ~5 million years ago. > Arithmetic mean population size a few hundred thousand. > Generation time ~20 years. > … 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. ---
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2017, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952/20 "2017-04-22T16:42:10Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Given that the expected shape is exponential, not power-law, what would be most useful would be a graph logarithmic in population but linear in time. Here you go: [http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/84225879/figure8\_v002-01\_1\_2.jpg](http://www.nature.com/scitable/content/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/ne0000/84225879/figure8_v002-01_1_2.jpg) from here [https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/an-introduction-to-population-growth-84225544](https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/an-introduction-to-population-growth-84225544) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/has-the-most-common-human-been-han-chinese/784952.md?page=2)