There are about 8.1 billion people alive today. Half of us live in the circle shown here! We will spend the first six weeks of our voyage inside this circle. By contrast about 4% of people live in the United States.
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| Half of humanity lives inside this circle. |
This part of the world has been the beating heart of humanity for millennia. People have been concentrated in India and China since antiquity, and for most of the past three thousand years the region has also been a tremendous source of cultural innovation and trade. If you'd arrived in a spaceship almost anytime in the past 3000 years and looked for the capital of human civilization, you'd have found it here.
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| Population density of the world over the past 3000 years |
The population of South Asia is incredibly dense and is especially concentrated in the valleys of the Ganges (in northern India), the Indus (in Pakistan) and the Brahmaputra (in Bangladesh). These three countries only became politically separated in the Partition of 1947.
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