Today, human influence has transformed almost every part of the globe. But looking at the span of human history, this wasn’t the case until quite recently.
That’s one of the many lessons from a series of fascinating maps and charts from WorldPopulationHistory.org, which shows the explosive growth of the world’s human population from 1 CE (1 AD) to the present and into the future.
Each of the dots in the map below indicates 1 million people, with some of the dots placed in the middle of a more spread-out population. The video demonstrates how the world population grew from only 170 million people in 1 CE to nearly 7.4 billion currently. And according to recent estimates from the World Bank, we will add another 4 billion people by 2100.