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Comment by oidar | Hacker News Reader

I figured there would be a hand full of instances of people dying from meteorites falls, but they have only ever bruised a person: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/only-person-ever-h...

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“only well-documented case of somebody being hit by a meteorite”

Significantly more people were alive in prehistory than in recorded history. So it’s likely one or more of them were significantly injured.

Is that actually true? Population growth has exploded in recorded history even though pre-history has years to its advantage

Five seconds' worth of googling shows that an estimate of Hominid population before 200,000 years ago is anywhere between 2 billion to 20 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_demography#Hominid...

This is one of those things that's probably incredibly difficult to estimate with any level of accuracy.

Why stop at hominids?

Because of the context of the discussion we were having.

People don’t normally consider all hominids as “people”. And if you do, you might also add dolphins, corvids, and the like.

When I put all the population estimates into a spreadsheet the last time it came up, the number of person-years lived can be roughly divided into thirds, one third from the dawn of anatomically modern humans to the beginning of agriculture, one third from the beginning of agriculture to 1600, and the remaining third from 1600 to today. By current estimates, well acquire an equal slice of lived experience between now and 2100.

Well, the important thing is the number of person-hours not the number of people since meteorite death has to be pretty random.

If 5 people took turns existing in sequence that's not more likely for a human observation than one human over that time. It only matters how many hours where humans were available to die and that's roughly matched between prehistory and the last 100 years.

If you want to get a really good estimate it’s worth considering the odds that either 0 or thousands of people dying in the same event when people are living in dense cities etc.

Tunguska over London would have had a serious death toll where an airburst in a remote area didn’t. But you’re going to see deaths in an area with a population density of 1 per square km or 100,000/km2.

It's not even clear that total amount of people who lived in prehistory is higher than amount of people currently alive today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

Your own source contradicts you: "The total number of humans who have ever lived is estimated to be approximately 100 billion. "

Pre-history is defined as the time before writing was invented or ~5000BC. The number of people alive before then is significantly smaller than 100B.

Written records of events didn’t start everywhere as soon as the first group invented writing.

More relevant when considering the criteria of well documented evidence, a hypothetical ship on an ocean voyage in 1500 is likely to just disappear. Let alone a random West African goat herder in 2200BCE.

The Wikipedia page links to this [0] article as a source, where the table states an estimated 9 billion “ever lived” at the 8000 BCE mark, and 55 billion at the 1 CE mark. The end of prehistory isn’t too well defined, but it’s usually taken to be around 5000 BCE (if not later). So while it’s not very precise of course, from those estimates it certainly looks like more humans lived in prehistory than now, by a few billion at least.

Given that the world population is predicted to peak at about 10.5 billion roughly 60 years from now, it also looks like this won’t change anytime soon.

[0] https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived...

That’s on the low end of estimates.

For comparison there’s still 300,000 Wild West African Gorilla today and they’re extremely restricted in range, share that range with modern humans, etc.

Human populations in prehistory were believed to average somewhere in the 1-15 million range which puts 10B at the very low end estimate with 100+ billion being considered plausible. There was at least one major bottleneck but humans predate the last ice age.

PS: Calling anything history before we have any surviving text to work with is also a stretch.

There's probably a Tunguska-sized event at some point that claims 99.99% of all meteorite victims and wasn't registered because everybody that knew about it died in it.

According to some witnesses, the Tunguska event itself killed three people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event

I wonder if any people died as an indirect result - someone startled by the flash of light or the bang, who stepped into the path of a carriage, or just slipped and fell and cracked their skull.

There is one theory that that the biblical story about the annihilation of the city of Sodom was brought about by a large air-burst meteor, think Chelyabinsk and add a couple of order of magnitude.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8452666/

However, note that when I was trying to find the original paper, that is, something more substantial than the popular news blurbs that are everywhere, I found wikipedia was less than impressed with the evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tell_el-Hammam

Anyhow, I suspect a lot of our long term generational history gets turned into religion and legend, that is to say, the legendary events probably happened but like a good fish story the facts get shifted over the years.

According to the estimates in https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived..., (substantially) less than 55 billion lived in prehistory, and more than that lived since (the current estimated number of humans ever having lived being above 117 billion).

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