Statistically, how many people have been born since men existed?

Question

Just give me an estimate. All people born in the world. all races, since the very first man. Up to this date.

Answer 1

About 12 billion.  They say that all the people that live on earth now (6 billion) is about half of all time world population; cool huh?

-Bob

Answer 2

To even attempt an estimate you would have to define what you mean by 'men'.  Do you refer to modern Homo sapiens?  Do you include Archaic Homo sapiens?  All of the genus Homo?  I would doubt you include Homo neanderthalensis but that is arguable.  What about Australopithecus specie? The concept of 'men' is far to vauge to give even a general approximation.

Answer 3

All right, we have one little problem here. The inner workings of evolution are not such that one day an archaic Homo sapien is in birth and then, voila, out pops the first true anatomically modern Homo sapien. Irregardless of the fact that evolution is a rather slow process, however, the earliest sites of anatomically modern Homo sapiens date back to around 100,000 years ago. Qufzeh and Skhul, in the middle east, are the oldest sites to have be dated definitively at 90,000 years ago, but there are also sites at Klasies River Mouth in South Africa and Omo-Kibish in Ethiopia where anatomically modern Homo sapiens have been found. The S. African site has been dated with electron spin resonance and resulted in being classified as between 134,000 and 74,000 years ago and the Ethiopian site was dated to 130,000 years ago, but the finding of a much more primitive skull in the same soil formation has led some to believe that the site had been disrupted and the finding may have come from a higher soil layer, so again this site is not with certainty. More recently DNA evidence has suggested a starting point of 150,000 or earlier and a recent 2003 discovery in Ethiopia unearthed a fossilized skeleton that dates to 154,000 - 160,000 but is still be debated as to if it is an Archaic Homo sapien, or a true anatomically modern Homo sapien?

Anyways, 125,000 years ago is as good a date as any for the beginning of anatomically modern Homo sapiens, but given the fact that the change would have been gradual you could easily put +/- 25,000 behind that to account for this evolutionary change to have occured in full and to account for our uncertainty in our original period of speciation from Archaic Homo sapiens. So if the earth's history were put into a large book with each page representing 1 million years (making the book 6000 pages long) then that gradual change and the first fully anatomically modern Homo sapien would be written down as taking his first step and walking on the face of the earth at the bottom of the last page.

Now that we have pegged the date at 125,000 years ago, you also want to "estimate" a head count for all mankind since this emergence? Truly, this is not possible. Looking at mitrochondrial DNA for instance, it is evident that there was a bottle neck in the human population 70,000 years ago such that the reproductively involved individuals (assumingly all that were present?) would have been no greater then 14,000 individuals. One hypothesis to account for this is the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Sumatra, Indonesia who's impending ash cloud and sulphuric acid rain had a catastrophic effect on the african continent thus reducing the number of humans present at that point and also resulted in a 12,000 year long ice age. At that one squeezed point on human development it is possible to estimate our population because of the extreme restriction that was put on our gene pool, but other less destructive events can not be estimated. The 70,000 years since were also marked with an ice age between 13,000 and 24,000 years ago and even a "mini ice age" that started in 1250 AD resulted in famine and death throughout medival europe. So considering that our population was truly not a linear progression, the numbers can not truly be estimated accurately.

If anyone was to produce a number they would be lying at best, because there is truly no way to know all the past variables, or to know how they would have effected our human population.

I hope all of this helps.