How Many People Lived Before History?

TL;DR

Roughly 30 billion people lived before written history, representing 97% of our species' entire timeline.

Key Points

• 1.About 8.1 billion people are alive today. Vsauce visualizes this using flour particles in a 5 lb bag, where each speck (~82.67 microns wide) represents one living human.
• 2.An estimated 30+ billion people lived before the invention of writing. These prehistoric humans were anatomically identical to us and invented bread, glue, calendars, musical instruments, alcohol, and domesticated dogs — yet left no recorded history.
• 3.Prehistoric lives account for 97% of our species' total existence. All of recorded human history spans only the final 3%, meaning the vast majority of human experience is entirely undocumented.