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craig1958Feb 5, 2012
Those numbers are probably low considering they only went back 50k years. That is a fairly conservative definition of "human."
bobbi21Feb 5, 2012
Humans (known taxonomically as Homo sapiens,[3][4] Latin for "wise man" or "knowing man")[5] are the only living species in the Homo genus. Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago, reaching full behavioral modernity around 50,000 years ago
from wiki. I'll accept it is a conservative definition but It is used.
craig1958Feb 6, 2012
Thanks, that sounds about right. I was just commenting that they could have gotten a larger number if they counted earlier "humans."
hopefuldavFeb 5, 2012
Very interesting. Anyone ever feel like me, that there doesn't seem to be enough graves/cemetaries to account for whatever percentage of all the people that have ever lived that would be buried? Where are all these dead people?
bobbi21Feb 5, 2012
no fancy burials through most of history. Just dig a hole and throw the person in. :P
and I guess all those ghost stories of places built on ancient indian burial grounds must be true :P
hopefuldavFeb 5, 2012
Yeah, good point and I kinda figured that in. I would still like to see some numbers about how many graves there are in the world (or even just the US). I know we have been burying folks for at least a few hundred years, right? It just seems to me they should be taking up much more room than it appears.
4Herp2Derp0Feb 5, 2012
Even though there were cemeteries in early history, many bodies were just random or mass burials that will never be found.
Personally I would like to see the death of the cemetery. It's a silly religious superstition that takes up way too much valuable land.
bobbi21Feb 5, 2012
world is a big place. you could actually fit everyone alive right now side by side in los angeles. (about 1300 square kilometers) You can figure thats 1,300, 000 meters x 1000 meters so 1,300,000,000 square meters. You can pretty easily fit in about 6 ppl in a 1 square meter area. (a person can stand in about a square foot area. square meter would be around 9 square feet) So thats 7.8 bill people.
And of course ppl rot just like any other animal.
lowkeytedFeb 5, 2012
This part is just hypothesis, but I bet throughout history most people were buried in shallow graves, just one or two feet below the surface. At a shallow depth as opposed to six feet, there is still oxygen in the soil for microbes to use in digesting the body. Scavengers would be able to dig up the remains as well.
Also, ossuaries are buildings where the bones of decomposed bodies are kept. Catholics have to be put to rest in consecrated ground, but in medieval Europe there wasn't a lot of space. People were buried for a period until they decomposed, then their bones were removed from the grave put in a separate building on church grounds and the space was used to bury others.
I think modern burials are wasteful and embalmed corpses creep me out. I want to be ground up and buried one or two feet deep and let the microbes at me.
partrowFeb 5, 2012
Corpses decompose well at depth as well. There is plenty of action at 6+ feet, and embalming simply delays the decomposition. Joseph Mengele was nothing but bones after only 6 years:
http://www.xtimeline.com/evt/view.aspx?id=520781
casspaFeb 5, 2012
I feel so insignificant. Again.
craigstellmacheFeb 7, 2012
Have a plus digg.
bobbi21Feb 5, 2012
Guess we're in for a fight when the zombie apocalypse comes
cmlacandazoFeb 5, 2012
So much for that urban myth. Very interesting numbers!
akronFeb 5, 2012
WTF, we started with two humans 50K years ago?
(thanks PZ Myers)
elevenerFeb 5, 2012
Adam and Eve!!!
No seriously, I read somewhere that Homo Sapiens started with several thousand people evolving at once. I don't know what the '2 people' starting number means in that chart, except maybe to simplify the math?
akronFeb 5, 2012
Yes, evolution tracks changes in populations over time, not individuals. There is also evidence of a population bottleneck at one time which shows all humans alive today came from less than 1000-10,000 ancestors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
rudegarFeb 5, 2012
this world was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.
craigstellmacheFeb 7, 2012
So a Zombie War--wouldn't be close to having fair numbers :
"This means that we are nowhere near close to having more alive than dead. In fact, there are 15 dead people for every person living. We surpassed seven billion dead way back between 8000BC and AD1."
Im_High_TechFeb 5, 2012
Like this if you were alive before the 7 billion mark!
azharnadeemFeb 5, 2012
Every human is one of the 82 billion species who have lived on this earth. So dead are more in nmber i presume
partrowFeb 5, 2012
The article was referencing the number of people, not species.
If species were the topic, we have to figure that a great number of species of animals (and plants) have not been discovered or described, especially the smaller ones such as bacteria, fungii, etc.
norman619Feb 5, 2012
well it's common sense that the dead out number the living. Everyone who is alive now is going to die but before they die the majority will be having offspring to replace themselves.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
norman619Feb 5, 2012
I work in a school and see the death of the written word all the time. I do IT and sadly teachers always request we loan laptops to students during tests for the written part because their writing is usually so bad it's hard to read. :(
This is a private school mind you. It's probably even worse in public schools.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
norman619Feb 5, 2012
Damn it. Wrong article.
fxspec06Feb 5, 2012
lol