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Comment by comboy | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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