How Many Humans Have Ever Lived?
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The world's human population in 2022
In 2022, the world will likely hit a momentous milestone-a population of eight billion.
The dramatic increase in the world's human population is relatively new. For thousands of years, the world population would live in a mid-sized city today. But knowing how many humans came before us is a question demographers like Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub have tried to answer.
The combined human population
Quantifying all of humanity requires a firm starting date for when humans became human. For this exercise, the two demographers chose 190,000 BCE as the cutoff.
The demographers estimate that 109 billion people have lived and died over the course of 192,000 years. So adding the people alive today, we get 117 billion people that have ever lived. That means that for every person alive today, there are about 14 people who are not.
