This may sound foolish but how many people have ever lived on this planet? just how old is mankind?

Question

This may sound foolish but how many people have ever lived on this planet? just how old is mankind?

Answer 1

The earliest Hominid sites date back to 6 mya (mya)  From that point on hominids thrived and adapted and spread.  So much so, that most fossilized remains that are found from many millions of years ago are probably not even part of the direct lineage of modern Homo sapiens.  The generalized hominid path that led to humans over the past 4 million years is currently accepted to be Australopithecus anamensis, Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and then Homo Sapiens.  Their spread from Africa is still a debated issue as There was definitely a migration between 1.5-1.8 mya of the Homo Erectus which evolved into a variety of regional Archaic Homo sapiens.  Modern DNA evidence from neanderthal fossils is making the picture more clear in Europe and since the DNA found does not fit into the phyogeny of modern humans it is becoming more apparent that neanderthal made no genetic contribution to modern European populations.  This same evidence has not been provided for Asian variants of Archaic Homo Sapiens for lack of finding any DNA (Ridley 2004).  Modern Homo Sapiens date back to sites 100,000 ya and spread throughout the world.  Their are sites which show co-habitation between homo sapien and neaderthal in the middle east, but by the time that the modern Homo sapiens reached Europe there does seem to be a wholsale replacement.  A few archaeological sites have discovered what appear to be hybrids (according to osteological evidence sharing characteristics of both species), but considering the DNA evidence mentioned above it would seem that these hybrids species were not fertile or at the very least experienced a low reproductive sucess that saw them dwindle into extinction.  That is the history of "mankind" in a nutshell.  But it would be truly impossible to determine how many people have lived on the planet through all time.   Even if you just wanted to know how many Homo Sapiens have lived on the planet in the last 100,000 years since they first came into existence would be impossible seeing as the conditions for preservation are not consistent in all areas and, as of such, it could not even be estimated how populous anything was in the past no matter how many, or how few fossils were found.  So that portion of your question is not answerable in any factual way.  In evolution, it is also impossible to pin down an exact transitional time for any evolutionary change, especially pertaining to larger biological beings like ourselves, so 100,000 ya would more precisely be written as 100,000 ya +/- 5,000 ya.  A mathmetician, however might want to give it a try at estimation and start at 100,000 and then determine a birthrate as well as a deathrate for individuals that die before reproduction.  Pick an IBR (inter birth ratio) and make the numbers all fit a slow increase in population from 100,000 years ago until about 4000 years ago where spurts of exponential growth that began with advances in civilization.  Add that linear progression from 100,000 - 4,000 ya to whatever has been determined for the more complicated recent history of civilization and then that would give you a number that you might be happy with?

Answer 2

ive been told that over 100 billion people have lived on earth

Answer 3

If we only take H.O.M.O sapiens sapiens, estimates are around the 24 billions if we calculate 50 generations per 1000 years and put the sapiens sapiens appearance at about 200k y-o.

Edit: sorry done a mistake in calculation... not 12b but 24b...

Answer 4

man kind is nearly 1 million years old

earth is 4.6 billion years old.

we will never know how many men have walked the earth

but its safe to say there are more SPECIES of bacteria then men who have walked the earth that exist right now, humans are insignificant

Answer 5

This Wiki article has some really good information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_popul...

The earliest human ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, walked Africa longer than 1.4 million years ago (the figure that they gave when I took anthro 15 years ago).  Another Wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australopit...

Modern human beings, Homo sapiens, have existed for about 200,000-ish years.

Answer 6

Man "as we know him today" is about 65 thousand years old not counting the Neanderthal man who is considered another line of man and not connected to us.

   Humans on this Earth, walking talking and eating as two legged creatures is about three millions of years old but, this is all the lines of mankind and his relatives, including the chimpanzees and older ape like creatures that are related.

Answer 7

more than you could ever count. we have been here for 20 millions years or more.  every time we turn around, they are finding new ancestor bones older than the last. at one point we were down to less than 2000 of our kind. what a comeback we have made.