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How the Global Population Boom Really Began
The Industrial Revolution gets credit for kicking off the world's human population explosion, but new research suggests we should look further back.
1804: that was the year the world population reached one billion, after hundreds of thousands of years of human existence. Today, just a couple hundred years later, we're primed to hit 8 billion.
It's well-documented that humanity's numbers have surged exponentially—and relatively recently. A chart from populations scientist Joel Cohen’s book, How Many People Can the Earth Support?, makes that startlingly clear: