# Of everyone ever born, which number are you?

Enter your birthday to see how many of the roughly 117 billion humans born since 190,000 BCE came before you, how many came after, and how much of all human life you have lived through.

## The tower of everyone

Below, each dot is **a million people**, stacked in order of birth: the newest at the top, the oldest at the bottom. The top is today; below it, every generation back to the first humans.

The years on the left crowd together at the top and spread out further down: about 132 million people are born each year now, while in prehistory it was a few tens of thousands.

- Today. About four people are born every second, so a new dot fills up roughly every two and three-quarter days.
- 1950. Everything above this row, 9.8 billion people, was born since then: about one in twelve of everyone ever born, measured against PRB's total.
- 1879, Albert Einstein. More than eight in ten of all the people born up to today had already been born.
- 1850, Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet.
- 1800. More than three-quarters of everyone ever born lies below this row.
- 1452, Leonardo da Vinci. Five years before Stephen the Great took Moldavia's throne, at least six in ten of all the people born up to today had already been born.
- Year 1. Between three in ten and half of all people were born below this row, depending on the assumptions. Julius Caesar, probably born in 100 BCE (some historians argue for 102), had fewer people before him than after him, whichever assumptions you choose.
- 8000 BCE. Farming was just beginning. Below this row lie 182,000 years, almost the whole history of the species, and less than a tenth of the tower.
- 50,000 BCE. The first version of this calculation, published in 1995, started here. The 2022 version goes down to 190,000 BCE.
- 190,000 BCE. Two people. The calculation starts from a simplifying assumption its authors call “minimalist”; they consider it unlikely that humans descended from two people.

## Do the living outnumber the dead?

Not remotely. 8.3 billion people are alive today, about **7 in 100** of everyone ever born. For every living person there are roughly **13 dead**.

In the 1970s a claim went round that three-quarters of all the people ever born were alive. Carl Haub, the demographer who first ran this calculation for the Population Reference Bureau, wrote that nobody knows who started it: “a now-forgotten writer”. His numbers showed the opposite.

## How much of all the years humans have lived has passed since you were born?

Now count the years lived: every year of every human life, from 190,000 BCE to today, added up. It comes to about **1,850 billion person-years**. How many of them have passed since you were born?

First bar: the share of all the years humans have ever lived that has passed since 1961. Second: the share of everyone ever born who was born since then.

The gap between the two bars is the story of the last century. People today are many at once, and they live long: a 70-year life weighs as much as seven 10-year lives, and life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about ten years for most of history, by PRB's estimate; that average includes the many children who died young. That is why someone born in 1961 has seen only 7% of all births, but about a fifth of all the life humans have ever lived.

## Where have people lived?

Since the year 1, almost **two-thirds** of all the years humans have lived were lived in Asia. Europe, together with the former Soviet Union, hosted less than a fifth.

On the territory Maddison assigns to Romania, about **one year in 220** has been lived since the year 1. Maddison puts its population at 800,000 in both the year 1 and the year 1000; by 2008 it had grown almost 28-fold.

## Three lives back to 1788

People are many, but their lives need few links to reach far. Three people with verified ages, each alive at the same time as the next, connect today with a child born in 1788, the year before the French Revolution.

The chain deliberately avoids the most famous case, Jeanne Calment (1875–1997), whose age was challenged in a 2019 article by a Russian mathematician, Nikolai Zak, and defended the same year by Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard, the researchers who had validated it in the 1990s. Without her, the chain reaches just as far.

## Method and sources

Nobody counted the people of prehistory. The total of about 117 billion is a model, published by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB), an American demographic research institute: a handful of benchmarks with the world's population in given years and an assumed birth rate for each era, with constant growth between benchmarks. The authors themselves call it “semi-scientific” and write that it may underestimate the number of births somewhat.

We rebuilt PRB's 2022 table with the method the authors describe: from the year 1 to 1900, the formula gives the same births within 0.3%. The first two rows do not. The 50,000–8000 BCE row only comes out if you start from two people in 50,000 BCE, as the 2002 edition did, rather than the two million in the new table. The 190,000–50,000 BCE row shows 7.86 billion births in the table and 1.62 billion by the stated method. The central number keeps PRB's printed value for every row up to 1950, including the ones that do not reproduce.

From 1950 on, births are counted year by year from UN estimates (World Population Prospects 2024; for 2024–2026, the medium-variant projection). The total at mid-2022 comes to 117.14 billion, against 117.02 in PRB's table.

The range beside your number shows the results of the 12 tested combinations of three choices, each with a source: where to start (190,000 BCE, as PRB did in 2022, or 50,000 BCE, as in 2002), the birth rate up to the year 1 (80 per thousand, as PRB assumes, or 60), and the world's population in the year 1 (300 million, as PRB assumes, or the ends of the range compiled by the US Census Bureau, 170 and 400 million). They only change the years before about 1200, so the number of people born after you does not move.

Person-years are the area under the population curve: the world's population multiplied by time. Up to 10,000 BCE we use PRB's benchmarks, then Our World in Data's long-run series (based on HYDE), and from 1950 the UN figures. The range uses, year by year, the lowest and highest of the estimates from HYDE and those compiled by the US Census Bureau.

- Toshiko Kaneda and Carl Haub, How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?, Population Reference Bureau, 15 November 2022 https://www.prb.org/articles/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-earth/
- Carl Haub, How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?, Population Today, November/December 2002 https://academicweb.nd.edu/~rwilliam/ndonly/readings/PopDynamics/01-HistoricalOverview/How%20many%20people%20have%20ever%20lived%20on%20earth.pdf
- United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024: births per year, 1950–2026 (via Our World in Data) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-births-per-year
- United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024: world population on 1 July (via Our World in Data) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-with-un-projections
- US Census Bureau, Historical Estimates of World Population (lower and upper estimates from several authors) https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html
- Our World in Data, long-run world population (HYDE, Gapminder, UN) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population
- Klein Goldewijk et al., Anthropogenic land use estimates for the Holocene – HYDE 3.2, Earth System Science Data, 2017 https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/9/927/2017/essd-9-927-2017.html
- Angus Maddison, Statistics on World Population, GDP and Per Capita GDP, 1–2008 AD (2010 version) https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/data/md2010_horizontal.xlsx
- Scientific American, Fact or Fiction?: Living People Outnumber the Dead, 2007 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-living-outnumber-dead/
- Gerontology Research Group, Geert Adriaans Boomgaard https://www.grg-supercentenarians.org/geert-adriaans-boomgaard/
- LongeviQuest, oldest living people https://longeviquest.com/2026/09/naomi-whitehead-americas-oldest-person-turns-116/
- Robine, Allard, Herrmann and Jeune, The Real Facts Supporting Jeanne Calment as the Oldest Ever Human, Journals of Gerontology A, 2019 https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/article/74/Supplement_1/S13/5569844
- Nikolai Zak, Evidence That Jeanne Calment Died in 1934—Not 1997, Rejuvenation Research, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1089/rej.2018.2167

Canonical: https://mariuscomper.uk/al-catelea-om-esti/en/