Population

HISTORY

In 8000 BC there may not have been more than 8 million humans on earth.

The world population at the time of the birth of Christ has been estimated at about 300 million, which is just below the present US population.

In 1315 Bad weather and crop failures result in famines across north western Europe. Unsanitary conditions and malnutrition increase the death rate. Even after the revival of agricultural conditions, weather disasters reappeared. A mixture of war, famine and plague in the Late Middle Ages reduced the population by half.

At the time of the Black Death in the mid-14th century, the world population was only 370 million.

Miicrobiologist Anton van Leeuwenhoek calculated there was roughly 13.4 billion people back in 1679, based on the population density of his native Holland and its size relative to the rest of the globe.

The world population is estimated to have reached one billion in 1804, with two, three and four billion in 1927, 1960 and 1974 respectively.

July 11, 1987 was designated "The Day of Five Billion" by the United Nations, marking its estimate of the day on which the world's population would pass that figure. Matej Gašpar from Zagreb, Croatia (then SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia), was chosen as the symbolic 5-billionth person concurrently alive on Earth.

The proclaimed 6 billionth living human in the world was born on October 12, 1999. Shortly after midnight in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Fatima Nevic gave birth to a historic 8-pound boy. The United Nations Population Fund designated this Bosnian baby was the special six billionth human.

The United Nations declared October 31, 2011 to be 'The Day of Seven Billion' when the world population officially reached that figure. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke at the United Nations building in New York City on this new milestone about the size of world population and the issues it raises.

The years taken for every billion people to be added to the world's population

Between 1960 and 2010, the world population rose from 3 billion to 6.8 billion. In other words, there has been more growth in population in the last fifty years than the previous 2 million years that humans have existed.

CURRENT POPULATION STATISTICS

Every minute the world's population increases by 146, with 249 births set against 103 deaths.

For every person that dies, 2.39 people are born.

Around the world, 107 baby boys are born for every 100 baby girls, but because women tend to live longer than men, in the total world population there are only about 101 men for every 100 women.

The total weight of the global population is 287 million tonnes, according to researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. About 18.5 million tonnes of this is down to people being overweight.

There are currently 1.8 billion young people, aged between 10 and 24- years-old.

Demographers say the average couple needs to have 2.1 children to keep the population steady. In Western Europe, that number had dropped to 1.4 by the late 1990s.

The total number of people who have ever lived was estimated by the Population Bureau in 2017 to be 108,470,690,115. The current world population is about 7.8 billion and increases by 2.3 people every second. These figures mean that about one fifteenth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today.

China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil and Pakistan account for half the world's people. More than one in three people are Chinese or Indian.

As a percentage of world population, China's population has declined from 37% to 19% since 1750.

Only 10% of the World’s population lives in the Southern Hemisphere.

If Earth's population was a village of precisely 100 people, there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas and 8 Africans.

Vatican City (800) and Nauru (9,378) are the states with the lowest populations.

If all the world's countries swapped land masses according to their population sizes, the US, Yemen, Brazil, and Ireland wouldn't move.

Source Daily Express