I'm not really obsessed with corpses and skeletons, but it's funny how often a topic comes up when you start thinking about it. A friend just sent me this nice BBC link about our place in the demographic scheme of things. As well as finding out I was possibly the 3,895,488,147th human alive on Earth, I also learned about a man called Carl Haub at the Population Reference Bureau, who's worked out that some 108 billion people have been born since 50,000 BC, roughly when people evolved into people. Taking away the 7 billion who are still alive today, that's over 100 billion bodies...
I just did my own crude estimate and I propose that since humans turned up in the UK tens of thousands of years ago, somewhere around 850 million people have been born and lived here. And some 790 million of those have died here. Somehow I'm not surprised any more at the number of ancient burials around the place. I'm just amazed there aren't more.
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