Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years.

For the vast majority of that time, the total population of humans has been quite small.

Then suddenly, at least in the grand sweep of history, the population of humanity exploded. Now it appears that humans might be on the cusp of a new era of demographics,

the likes of which we haven't experienced before.

Learn more about the global population

since the dawn of humanity and what's in store for the future

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. trying to estimate the population of humanity throughout history is a very difficult task.

Taking a census is a rather recent phenomenon historically speaking.

Even when ancient empires took a census of their population, the results were probably lost to history.

So we're left with having to create estimates of what historical human population levels were. That being said, even though it's necessary to make

estimates of what populations were, we have a lot of evidence we can use to make

educated estimates. For example, through archaeological evidence, we know how people lived.

We know how they fed themselves and we know what size communities they lived in.

Through the study of human remains, we know at what age people died and approximately

how many children they had. We can start the population

discussion at the very dawn of human history going back 4 million to 200,000 years ago

when humans and their homided ancestors lived on the African savanna.

Many of our ancestors who lived at this time wouldn't even be considered modern humans, but

knowing their numbers are still insightful.

The estimates for the total population of hominids or humans during this period at any given time

would be somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 people. That estimate spans a full order of magnitude, indicating the difficulty

in making such estimates. However, populations of any creature will naturally rise and fall over time,

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