Was there ever a time when there were more living people than dead people?

by [deleted]
brigantus

Mathematically, yes, this self-evidently was once the case: in the period of time between when the first human beings were born and when their cumulative deaths exceeded the current population. You could express that as a fairly simple differential equation if you were so inclined and you could estimate birth and death rates.

That is assuming you can identify some sort of definite start point on when "humans" first came into being which, to the frustration of those of us who like to start studying history at the very beginning, you can't. Does a human have to be our species, or can we include our close cousins like the Neanderthals? If the latter, how close is close? Just Homo? Australopithecus (think "Lucy")? Paranthropus? If we say it's just Homo sapiens, when in our ancestral line did we become "fully human"? At our last common ancestor with archaic humans (but at that point we were still identical to our excluded cousins, and interbred with them freely for thousands of years afterwards)? When we started talking or our brain reached a certain size? Even if you could pin down human-ness to a particular taxonomic group, you have the classic chicken and egg problem: at some point you have to say there was a human whose parents and siblings weren't human, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

tl;dr: No!