Top 15 Most Populated Countries (10000 BCE - 2100 AD)

Really cool video

4 Likes

Wow, Nigeria!

This was fantastic @Patrick. I would never have guessed where Mexico started.

1 Like

What’s the extrapolation into the future based on? How do they stave off ecological disaster, resulting in population collapse?

3 Likes

Absolutely mesmerizing, Patrick. Especially the ebb and flow of China and India.

Nigeria is very sobering for me because I have Nigerian friends who often share with me the serious challenges facing their country. Handling such an explosion in population appears to be an even more daunting prospect.

Patrick, the video makes me recall some amazing videos where “four dimensions” of nation data are displayed on one 2D graph by using moving spheres which also grow/shrink as the year counter advances.

I have a friend who was has art history degrees but she regulaly teaches visual arts courses which help students learn to utilize many amazing methods of data display. I would love to develop such skills.

3 Likes

. . .which means that you are talking about a large area encompassing much of the Mediterranean regions including Egypt, Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, on east into Arabia and the Fertile Crescent/Mesopotamia/Persia/Babylonia. OK.

Not sure what you are getting at—but OK. (I’m not sure how you would define “tiny” but your opinion is duly noted.) Moreover, why does the population size of the areas where Biblical events took place matter to you? Is population size the primary determinant of the importance of ancient empires and their cultures?

I guess I’ve never thought of the Greek and Roman empires, the Egyptian empires, and the Assyrian/Persian/Babylonian empires and various adjacent regions as being “remote.”

How did you go about evaluating the relative superstitiousness of various ancient peoples all over the planet in order to determine that the peoples of the aforementioned geographical areas ranked as the most extreme? I would like to see your data. I’m also curious how one goes about qualifying, categorizing, and then quantifying what constitutes “superstitious.” Were ancient East Asian people groups less superstitious? Were ancient sub-Saharan African civilizations less superstitious? How about the ancient aboriginal peoples of Australia and Micronesian lands? How about the peoples of the ancient Americas?

Perhaps you could start with your preferred definition of superstitious. Does that definition conform to academic standards?

I studied a lot of history in my day and I don’t recall any of my ancient history, Western civilization, or Ancient Near Eastern cultures professors describing any of the peoples in the lands of the Bible’s events as “the most backward people of the world.”

Are your conclusions a product of peer-reviewed scholarship or just a tongue-in-cheek shot from the hip?

I would certainly agree that many other regions of the ancient world deserve their place in academic studies. (Yet, I also understand that we can’t expect every undergraduate to have the time to enroll in a huge number of credit hours to get a more equitable exposure to all of the civilizations.)

Also, even if your assertions were true, do ideas become less important, meaningful, and/or extensive if they originated in less populated areas, in more remote lands, and among cultures with ideas which don’t share your worldview? That would be, at best, some kind of Argument from Negative Associations fallacy. If I understand your position accurately, it sounds to me like you are at least implying a massive non sequitur.

By the way, important and even revolutionary ideas usually start small, even in the mind of just one individual (a population of one.) Do I need to provide historical examples, whether they be philosophers, political leaders, military heroes, inventors, or scientists? Many started from obscure origins and may have come from remote areas. Why would any of that matter? Their ideas may have started with a very small population and yet eventually those ideas swept across the planet.

In any case, you have yet again presented us with a fascinating discussion topic.

In all seriousness, I’d like to see a YEC version. Presumably the eight people aboard the Ark spoke the same language, ate the same food, wore the same kinds of clothes, etc. So how quickly did disparate cultures like China and Egypt form? And how does the YEC version graft post flood expansion onto recorded histories that pre-date the flood?

3 Likes

Just for my own information, how many distinct personalities does Patrick have?

3 Likes

Don’t forget that Tower of Babel thing kinda screwed things up for some time as far as communication goes. That needs to be in the YEC account too. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

@AllenWitmerMiller or @moderators, did someone change the owner of this post accidentally? Top 15 Most Populated Countries (10000 BCE - 2100 AD) - #5 by AllenWitmerMiller

Ken Ham’s revenge?

2 Likes

Wow! It properly displayed me as the author when I wrote it.

I can’t imagine how that would get changed, even accidentally!

It appears that the Discourse software has somehow transposed the poster-identity and the reply-to-identity.

@swamidass, I looked through the tool options accessible to me and it doesn’t appear that I have anything close to that sort of admin-privilege (??) that would allow me to make such a swap even if I wanted to do so.

I can still edit my post content but I don’t see any access to fundamental attributes of the post.

I wonder why China exploded around 1000 AD. Mexico and Brazil’s instantaneous fall was expected, took them a good while to work their way back up. Why Nigeria, so much more than anyone else apparently?

After reading you email and then reloading this thread page by going to the main PS page and clicking this thread, my original reply to Patrick suddenly was back to its original condition. It now displays as a post from me replying to Patrick.

Perhaps someone edited the post, later discovered the corruption, and restored it. I did nothing.

I changd ownership to you. It is still odd, because I don’t see where you quots come from. q

Yes, I just now noticed that @Patrick’s post to which I replied is no longer there.

If Patrick had deleted his own post, it should be in the 24-hour countdown mode before disappearing entirely.

I think Google Drive spreadsheets has a way to do that.

I wasn’t able to find The original quote, but I think @Patrick might be on to something here.

Stand by. Need to find a link …

If we think about evolving culture and ideas, and in this case maybe evolving religion, then a low population, relatively isolated area might be a place where new ideas can become fixed in the population? Or maybe I’m just sleepy and not thinking right …

1 Like

I have no idea what kind of data structures the Discourse Software uses—but I wonder if a pointer-table got corrupted.

Back in the 1970’s I sometimes had to debug mysteries like this and it usually traced to an indexing issue or a bit-corruption in an attribute field.

1 Like

My reply to @patrick was originally post #6 in the thread (and his was #5)—but now mine is post #5 and it is treated by Discourse as a reply to my own post #4.

That seems like a pointer skip to me and there’s no longer any pointer to Patrick’s original post #5.

The fact that Discourse was showing Patrick as replying to Patrick sure seems like bad pointers.

1 Like