We can now watch 6,000 years of urban settlements and movements unfold on our computer screens.
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.
Read the full story: The rise and fall of great world cities: 5,700 years of urbanisation – mapped
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