Human Population Through Time

How we became more than 7 billion – humanity’s population explosion, visualized.

From our origins in Africa, humans began migrating around the globe roughly 100,000 years ago. It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion.

This data visualization from the American Museum of Natural History beautifully charts humanity’s stunning – and increasingly alarming – exponential expansion to our current population of roughly 7.8 billion.