S.T.A.G.E. said:
Humans have been around for thousands of years (as homosapien-sapien). There are already nearly 7 billion of us alive today. This is just a mental note for how many billion dead there are of us (not to mention we've made it easy for history with marked and unmarked graves). We've done a little number on nature in terms of the number of children we create and spread. We're also nomadic by nature, so that doesn't help at all. |
Homo sapiens is supposed to be about 200,000 years old. They probably only left East Africa 130,000 to 60,000 years ago.
More to the point (and much more distressingly for our future), our numbers have only exploded in the past hundred years or so, when we developed sufficiently advanced agriculture to produce an abundance of food, the science we need to store the food, infrastructure and machines to move the food where it needs to be, and the medicines to let us not die at the rate we should. Let's not forget such essentials as artificial fertilizers, automobiles, and germ theory are all younger than many (most?) modern nations. There were less than a billion of us when Napoleon kicked the bucket, for example.
The point is, there weren't as many of us as you'd think until recently. Additionally, we have plenty of samples of homo sapiens: it's earlier branches, like homo erectus, that we're largely blank on. That's not surprising, since these primitive hunter gatherers apparently didn't exactly survive long or even often. They certainly numbered far, far fewer than the dinosaurs.
