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Article: Human Population
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- Biology
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Human Population
Human population refers to the number of people living in a particular area, from a village to the world as a whole. A secondary meaning of population is the inhabitants themselves, but in most uses population means numbers.
No one knows the population of the earliest humans, but there may have been only a few tens of thousands of individuals when the species
Homo sapiens
first emerged 200,000 years ago. Today more than 6 billion human beings inhabit the earth. Three-fifths of them live in one continent, Asia, with the rest occupying every continent except Antarctica.
The overwhelming bulk of human population growth has occurred since the Industrial Revolution began, ...