1% weight

Ok this is a shocker. The graphic below says it all really.

10,000 years ago Earth looked very different. The climate was changing and humans were becoming more settled as they started domesticating animals and tinkering with agriculture. I’d recommend this video if you’d like to know more about what humans were up to then and the wild animals which existed at the time.

10,000 years ago there were probably around five million humans and we represented just 1% of the weight of all vertebrate land animals at the time. The last time I looked here there were 7 billion 800 million (or so) of us, and many of us weigh rather more than we should.

Interestingly, the human population is growing more slowly than it once was. We are currently increasing by 1% every year which is half the rate of growth compared to the 1960s.

I don’t know about you, but personally I would like to see a world with fewer domesticated animals and more wild animals? I don’t think that is going to be possible though anytime soon whilst the biosphere is disproportionately weighed down by humans with a love of cheap meat and a fear of wild critters.