Hacker News Reader

There is considerable debate over when the first Homo sapiens sapiens appeared, but the consensus is that it was much longer ago than 50 000 years. 200 000 would be considered a fairly conservative number these days. This obviously skews the math a little.

View on HN

200,000 years ago is the approximate consensus for the arrival of Homo sapien; however the commonly held belief is that behavioral modernity occurred approximately 50,000 years ago.

Most of that doesn't really end up mattering because the last 10,000 years (marked at the origin of agriculture, 8000 BCE in the BBC table) have contributed disproportionately to the 107B figure. An extra 150,000 years at a baseline 1M population wouldn't throw the figure off more than 10-15%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com