[Image: Wallpaper Flare]
Homo sapiens have long been the reigning champ of the mammalian world. We’ve spread like glitter at a preschool craft table—nearly every continent, every climate, from penthouses to potholes.
We even outnumber our scrappy runner-up, the rat, by something close to a billion. Not bad for a species that still struggles with group chats.
But according to a new study, we might be a whole lot more successful (read: numerous) than we even realised.
Most estimates peg the global headcount at around 8.2 billion, but Josias Láng-Ritter, a postdoc researcher at Finland’s Aalto University, says that figure may be well off, especially when it comes to folks living out in the sticks. In a study published in Nature Communications, Láng-Ritter et al. suggest the population in rural areas has been seriously lowballed.
“We were surprised to find that the actual population living in rural areas is much higher than the global population data indicates—depending on the dataset, rural populations have been underestimated by between 53 percent to 84 percent over the period studied,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement.
“The results are remarkable, as these datasets have been used in thousands of studies and extensively support decision-making, yet their accuracy has not been systematically evaluated.”
The datasets used to inform governments, aid groups, and scientists may have missed millions—possibly billions—of people living outside city limits. Imagine planning dinner and realising you forgot to count half your guests.
So how did he figure this out? With a splash of creativity and a dash of dam logic. Literally. Láng-Ritter used population data from 300 rural dam projects across 35 countries, dating from 1975 to 2010, where people were moved and compensated—so counting was done with receipts.
“When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated,” Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. “The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected. Unlike global population datasets, such local impact statements provide comprehensive, on-the-ground population counts that are not skewed by administrative boundaries. We then combined these with spatial information from satellite imagery.”
That’s right—where governments struggle to count noses, compensation paperwork and satellite images may have just blown the census out of the water.
So why the undercount in the first place? Well, it turns out reaching rural areas isn’t just hard on the postal service, it’s a logistical nightmare for census takers. Many countries simply don’t have the infrastructure or budget to accurately count every last village. And those errors in the rural tally could mean entire communities getting short-changed when it comes to funding, services, and political clout.
Of course, not everyone’s buying the claim that humanity has been hiding billions of bonus members this whole time.
“If we really are undercounting by that massive amount, it’s a massive news story and goes against all the years of thousands of other datasets,” said Stuart Gietel-Basten from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, in a chat with New Scientist.
In other words, sure, it’s a juicy theory, but without rock-solid proof, it’s like suggesting we all have long-lost cousins living in the woods—and they’ve never once used a cellphone.
So, is humanity even more populous than we thought, or is this just statistical déjà vu? Time—and probably another round of satellite surveillance—will tell. Until then, we may want to rethink what “middle of nowhere” really means.
[Source: Popular Mechanics]