> their discovery of a stone sarcophagus which they unsealed, only to find that it enclosed a further sarcophagus. This too they unsealed, and discovered a coffin inside. On opening it, they found it contained an “albino lizard”—that is, a gecko—very carefully cocooned in cloth wrappings.
6000 years of Egyptian archaeology and history translates into about 300 human generations... pretty mind-boggling, that's a lot of ancestors living off the Nile.
It still happens (though highly illegal if caught, but bribes get you far). Which is why I found the argument the other day about returning artifacts to Egypt in a different HN thread kind of bonkers. Most Western explorers didn't so much loot important artifacts from the Egyptians as merely find them much in the same way the Egyptians did: digging through rubbles of ancient sites used by the locals as building materials or discarded trash piles.
If you think about it like so it’s apparent that more people have lived and died then are living:
In 1804, there were 1 billion people. If the average generation lives 40 years (not a perfect estimate, but not awful at least till the late 1900s), that’s at least 5 billion people dead that lived over that time ignoring all population growth. But by 1900 we had about 2 billion people and using similar logic we could adjust our number up.
2.5 bill 1800-1900 and 5 bill 1900-2000. It has been half a generation since 2000, and in 2000 we had 6 billion. We have life expectancy issues at this point but I would expect you’d agree that we’ve had a further 1.5 billion deaths since then.
I’m other words, I would be surprised if there are more people alive now than had lived in the last 220 years. You could do a cumulative sum of population data to get a really rough number but it would double count those who lived through several censuses. This logic isn’t perfect but is a good motivating example for why these numbers add up.
It's estimated that about 100 billion humans have ever lived.[1]
As a fraction of population to have ever existed, more people are alive now then at any point in history - i.e. 8% of all the humans to have ever existed being alive right now is kind of wild.
To play devils advocate, there was some point in time where the first modern humans were all alive. That would’ve been brief and may be essentially impossible to define but if you were to determine a cutoff point for the 100bn (or so) that means there was a first group.
Equally interesting is that we may be getting closer to "peak population".
I don't think we are quiet there yet, but there is evidence that the rate of growth is slowing, and in some places there may be population decline. If that trend continues then we may level off, perhaps even slowly decine.
Barring a major event (like a global pandemic which seems unlikely :) I don't think we see drastic decline. Climate Change though may affect things, although that will happen slowly and humans are very mobile, and adaptable.
Imagine the suspense!