Our Global Population

HOMO SAPIENS IS THE MOST SUCCESSFUL mammalian species in Earth’s history, and it’s not even close. However, a new study suggests that the impressive nature of humanity’s proliferation may have been vastly underreported.

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Most estimates place Earth's human population at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter—a postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University in Finland—claims that these estimates could be underrepresenting rural areas by a significant margin.

“We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates—depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement.