05-31-2007, 08:21 AM
Carrie, you are right, for most of human history the population was probably between 5-500 million, wide spread, but this is from pre-ice age to the 1700's (it is estimated that the Hawaiian Islands had 750,000 - over 1 million people at the time of contact). My class notes & a couple of books from the courses I had last semester put the world population at around 1 billion in the middle of the 1800's, 2 billion in the 1930's, 4 billion 1975, 5 billion 1987, and we are now somewhere around 6.5 billion.