What 6,000 Years of Population Data Looks Like

We can now watch 6,000 years of urban settlements and movements unfold on our computer screens.

1 minute read

June 28, 2016, 1:00 PM PDT

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


Pyramids of Giza

Iordanis / Shutterstock

Kanishk Tharoor shares news of recent research, published in the journal Scientific Data, that "transcribed and geocoded nearly 6,000 years of data (from 3700BC to AD2000)" to create the a "digitised database of city populations through world history."

In fact, "[t]he resulting dataset – available for free online – bills itself as 'a first step towards understanding the geographic distribution of urban populations throughout history and around the world'."

As these things work nowadays, that research allowed an intrepid blogger to create a visualization of all that data, which is also free to watch at the Metrocosm website.

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