⏩Fast Forward Aotearoa #9: Global population and demographic trends

The planet groans / every time it registers another birth

…Continuing my survey across the 2022 global macro landscape within which Aotearoa exists, this week let’s take a broader look at global population and demographic trends.

Total global population will hit 8 billion in 2022

“the planet groans

every time it registers another birth”

— Paul Simon, Born at the right time

The earliest fossil fragment records of Homo sapiens date from approximately 300,000 years ago, discovered at the Moroccan archaeological site of Jebel Irhoud. There is also plenty of early prehistoric evidence for our species found in both South and East Africa.

The Out Of Africa scientific consensus describes successive waves of migration from the African Continent to Asia and as far as Australia and South America between 270,000-16,000 BCE, together with a degree of interbreeding with other archaic human subspecies — before sapiens became the only hominid left on the planet and began its path to ecological dominance over most other species.

By 1 CE the Earth's human population…