About

a human life

sex

— Drawn at the ratio of boys to girls actually born.

height

— Adult height for their sex, nation and century, or a child's height for their age.

born

— An exact date. The year is drawn from every birth in history, so crowded centuries come up more often.

died

— An exact date, or still alive.

lifespan

— Years lived, shown for those who have died.

age

— Current age, shown for those still alive.

cause of death

— Drawn from the causes recorded for their era and age, with seasonal illnesses leaning toward the right months.

birth nation

— The state or culture they were born into, which may no longer exist.

primary language

— Drawn from the languages spoken in that nation at that time.

profession

— Drawn from the occupational structure of their era, class and sex.

literacy

— None, partial or yes, from literacy rates for their time, place and trade.

body modification

— Shown only for people whose society commonly practised one, drawn from prevalence by nation, sex, era, age and class.

siblings

— How many, and where they fell in the birth order.

children

— How many they had, and how many reached adulthood.

an animal

species

— Drawn by global population, so the commonest animals come up most.

common name

— The everyday name for that species.

kind

— The broad group it belongs to, such as rodents or beetles.

born

— An exact date, back-dated from its age.

age

— Drawn against the typical and maximum lifespan for the species.

region

— A continent or ocean where that species lives.

has children

— Whether it has bred, given its age and species.

a speculative organism

simulated

— Whether the organism is a simulation rather than a physical being.

home

— Where it lives, from Earth to a structure built around a star.

intelligence

— A level from 0 to 10, anchored to Earth life of comparable cognition.

earth analogue

— The Earth species closest to it, used for the picture.

depicted as

— Shown instead of an analogue when nothing on Earth is comparable.

born

— A date anywhere from a billion years ago to five billion years ahead.

Animal populations and lifespans

• van den Hoogen et al. 2019, Soil nematode abundance and functional group composition at a global scale, Nature — 4.4 x 10^20 nematodes in surface soils nature.com
• Rosenberg et al. 2023, The global biomass and number of terrestrial arthropods, Science Advances — About 10^19 soil arthropods, 95% mites and springtails; springtails 3 x 10^18; above-ground arthropods contribute little to the count science.org
• Schultheiss et al. 2022, The abundance, biomass, and distribution of ants on Earth, PNAS — 20 quadrillion ants pnas.org
• Nyffeler & Birkhofer 2017, An estimated 400-800 million tons of prey are annually killed by the global spider community, The Science of Nature — About 21 quadrillion spiders link.springer.com
• Humes 1994 and Boxshall, copepods as the most abundant metazoans; one copepod per litre of seawater gives 1.3 x 10^21 marinebio.org
• Atkinson et al. 2009, A re-appraisal of the total biomass and annual production of Antarctic krill, Deep-Sea Research I — About 780 trillion adult krill antarctica.gov.au
• Cyclothone bristlemouths, the most abundant vertebrates, hundreds of trillions to a quadrillion individuals en.wikipedia.org
• Callaghan, Nakagawa & Cornwell 2021, Global abundance estimates for 9,700 bird species, PNAS — About 50 billion wild birds; per-species figures from the summary table (house sparrow 1.6 billion, European starling 1.3 billion, ring-billed gull 1.2 billion, barn swallow 1.1 billion) pnas.org
• Greenspoon et al. 2023, The global biomass of wild mammals, PNAS — Individuals by order from the published model: bats 5.6 x 10^10, rodents 2.6 x 10^10, primates 6.6 x 10^8, rabbits 5.5 x 10^8, carnivores 4.2 x 10^8; species reports for deer, raccoons, kangaroos and others; synanthropic rats and mice about 10^9 each pnas.org
• FAO livestock and poultry stocks 2024 via Our World in Data — Cattle 1.58 billion, sheep 1.36 billion, goats 1.19 billion, pigs 0.96 billion, buffalo 0.21 billion, poultry 29.6 billion ourworldindata.org
• Phillips et al. 2019, Global distribution of earthworm diversity, Science — Mean local abundance about 78 earthworms per square metre; multiplied by ice-free land for an order-of-magnitude total pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Winegard 2019, The Mosquito; about 110 trillion mosquitoes sangerinstitute.blog
• Smithsonian Institution BugInfo, roughly 10 quintillion insects alive at any time; the split between insect orders here is an estimate si.edu
• Lifespans, ranges and life histories per species from Wikipedia and the AnAge longevity database genomics.senescence.info
• Crowther et al. 2015, Mapping tree density at a global scale, Nature: 3.04 trillion trees nature.com
• FAO harvested areas 2023 (wheat 220 Mha, rice 165 Mha, maize 200 Mha) times typical sowing densities for crop plant counts; grasses, herbs, mosses and fungi are order-of-magnitude guesses with no global census fao.org

Appearance by language

• Language to phenotype weights for languages that mark an ethnic group: assigned from the peoples each humanphenotypes.net page names as typical (Hausa and Fula to the Sahel types, Yoruba and Igbo to the Guinea-coast types, Quechua and Aymara to the Andean type, Nahuatl and Mayan to the Mesoamerican types, and so on); colonial languages such as English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian are left to the nation table, with nation-specific mixes for immigrant communities from CIA World Factbook ethnic shares humanphenotypes.net

Appearance by nation

• Nation to phenotype weights: assigned from the peoples each humanphenotypes.net page names as typical, the nation's region and language family, and for modern multi-ethnic countries their census ethnic composition (CIA World Factbook) humanphenotypes.net

Body modifications

• Morris et al. 2016, Estimation of country-specific and global prevalence of male circumcision, Population Health Metrics — 37-39% of men worldwide; 99% in North Africa and the Middle East; rates by country used for the regional shares here ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• UNICEF 2024, female genital mutilation statistics — 230 million living women and girls; 98% Somalia, 96% Guinea, 93% Djibouti, 91% Egypt, 89% Mali; the two-tier shares here follow the country table data.unicef.org
• Chinese footbinding: a millennium of mutilation (Hektoen International) — 40-50% of all Chinese women in the 19th century and near 100% of upper-class Han; modelled by wealth level, spreading from the elite after the Song hekint.org
• Pew Research Center 2023, tattoo prevalence in the United States — 32% of American adults; comparable European surveys reach 40%+; pre-modern rates for Polynesia, the pre-colonial Philippines and the steppe are ethnographic estimates pewresearch.org
• Pitt Rivers Museum, scarification in Africa; decline under colonial rule and the 2003 Child Rights Act — Widespread across West and Central Africa and the Nilotic Sudan until the mid-20th century; shares here are estimates, ending around 1970 web.prm.ox.ac.uk
• Tiesler and colleagues on artificial cranial deformation in Mesoamerica and the Andes — Above 90% of skulls at many Mesoamerican sites and 88-98% in Andean collections; also practised by the Huns and Avars and on Vanuatu en.wikipedia.org
• Ohaguro and ritual tooth filing across Southeast Asia and Japan — 80% of rural Vietnamese blackened teeth in a 1938 survey; Japanese married women practised ohaguro until its 1870s prohibition en.wikipedia.org
• UN figures on breast ironing — 3.8 million girls affected, 25-50% in Cameroon; modelled as a modern practice in Cameroon and its neighbours ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Clothing

• Clothing in ancient Rome; the tunica as the basic garment of all classes — Commoner garments per culture: Egyptian shendyt and kalasiris, Greek chiton and himation, Roman tunic and cloak, the toga reserved for the wealthy en.wikipedia.org
• Hanfu of the Han dynasty and Ming commoner dress: hemp shanku and ruqun by law for farmers, silk for the wealthy en.wikipedia.org
• Kosode: everyday Japanese dress from the Kamakura to the Edo period en.wikipedia.org
• Deel: the belted robe worn by all classes across the Mongol world, silk-faced for the rich en.wikipedia.org
• Aztec, Maya and Inca dress: maxtlatl and tilmatli, huipil and cueitl, unku and acsu with lliclla; decoration restricted by rank encyclopedia.com
• Traditional African dress: wrappers and Sahel tunics for daily wear; agbada and kente as garments of status; the Ethiopian shamma and netela thegarmentatlas.com

Causes of death

• Düx et al. 2020, Measles virus and rinderpest virus divergence dated to the sixth century BCE, Science — Molecular clock dating of a 1912 measles genome puts the split from rinderpest around 500 BC, matching the rise of cities large enough to sustain it; measles cannot be drawn before that year science.org
• Named epidemics and weapons are restricted to the years they actually ran, from the standard dates for each event — Antonine Plague 165-190, Plague of Justinian 541-750, Black Death 1347-1353, sweating sickness 1485-1551, 1918 influenza 1918-1920, chemical weapons from 1915, atomic bombs from 1945, HIV/AIDS from 1959, COVID-19 from 2019; weights inside each window are raised so concentrating a pandemic into its true years does not erase it en.wikipedia.org
• Wolfe, Dunavan & Diamond, Origins of major human infectious diseases (National Academies) — Smallpox, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever and influenza descend from herd-animal pathogens and need dense host populations, so they are damped to 15% of their agrarian weight before cities and absent from the forager tables ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Critical community size: measles needs roughly 300,000 people to persist — Populations that large did not exist before about 3000 BC, which is why the neolithic table carries only a trace of these causes en.wikipedia.org
• Rich et al. 2009, The origin of malignant malaria, PNAS — Confirms Livingstone's argument that falciparum malaria became hyperendemic when farmers cleared forest and created sunlit pools for Anopheles gambiae; foragers are given roughly half the malaria weight of farmers in the same tropics pnas.org
• Houldcroft 2023, Infectious disease in the Pleistocene: old friends or old foes?, American Journal of Biological Anthropology — Foragers still carried endemic, zoonotic and parasitic infection, so malaria and respiratory and gut disease are reduced rather than removed before farming onlinelibrary.wiley.com
• IHME Global Burden of Disease 2021, deaths by cause, age and sex, global — Contemporary tables: cardiovascular 33%, cancers 18%, respiratory 7%, infections ~14%, injuries ~8%; under-5 dominated by neonatal disorders, pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria vizhub.healthdata.org
• Our World in Data, causes of death (GBD summary) ourworldindata.org
• WHO Global Health Estimates 2021 who.int
• Registrar General's Decennial Supplements, causes of death in England and Wales 1851-1900 — Industrial era: tuberculosis ~13% of deaths, pneumonia and bronchitis ~15%, diarrhoea and cholera ~8%, scarlet fever, measles, whooping cough, typhus, smallpox doc.ukdataservice.ac.uk
• Omran, The Epidemiologic Transition (1971) — Pre-transition: age of pestilence and famine; infections and maternal deaths dominate all ages en.wikipedia.org
• Wood et al., Osteological paradox; paleopathology of hunter-gatherers and early farmers — Prehistoric: infection, trauma, violence (~10-15% of adult male deaths in forager societies), childbirth, starvation, predation en.wikipedia.org
• Scheidel, Disease and death in the ancient city of Rome; Roman mortality — Malaria, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infection, Antonine and Justinianic plagues en.wikipedia.org
• Keeley, War Before Civilization; Gurven & Kaplan 2007 on forager violence; Levack on witch trials — Deaths in battle and raids fall overwhelmingly on men; forager homicide victims are mostly adult men; roughly 75-80% of those executed for witchcraft in early modern Europe were women en.wikipedia.org
• Loudon, Deaths in childbed from the eighteenth century to 1935, Medical History 30 (1986) — Maternal deaths 10-25 per 1,000 births in 16th-18th century England, 4-5 per 1,000 in 1850-1935. Causes 1872-76: puerperal fever 55%, haemorrhage 21%, convulsions 12%, abortion 4%, rupture and retained placenta 3%; 1930: sepsis 44%, toxaemia 16%, haemorrhage 12% doi.org
• UNODC Global Study on Homicide 2023 — 2021 homicide rate per 100,000: Americas 15.0, Africa 12.7, Oceania 2.9, Asia 2.3, Europe 2.2, world 5.8; 81% of victims male; 56% of female victims killed by partners or family unodc.org
• Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (2009) — Infectious disease, chiefly typhus and dysentery, rather than starvation accounts for most famine deaths; early modern Europe was a low-pressure regime with rarer famines; drought-driven famines concentrated in India, China and Africa; famine gone from peacetime Europe since the mid-19th century press.princeton.edu
• McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976) — Antonine plague killed 7-10% of the empire; Justinianic plague cut Mediterranean populations 25-60% over two centuries; Black Death 30-60% of Europe; New World populations fell up to 90% within 150 years of contact en.wikipedia.org
• Steckel & Rose (eds), The Backbone of History; Steckel, Rose, Larsen & Walker, Evolutionary Anthropology 11 (2002) — Health index from 12,520 Western Hemisphere skeletons. Skeletal infection score 52 in Central American farming populations vs 81-83 elsewhere; anemia worst in Central America; trauma no higher among foragers than farmers. Supports low forager violence weights and the pre-Columbian health decline doi.org
• Acsádi & Nemeskéri, History of Human Life Span and Mortality (1970) — Skeletal life tables: life expectancy at 20 about 25 years in the Roman period and up to 32 in the Iron Age; used to check the e0 of 25-28 on Roman and medieval rows books.google.com

Ethnic composition of mixed nations

• United States Census Bureau, 2020 Census: race and Hispanic origin census.gov
• Office for National Statistics, Census 2021: ethnic group, England and Wales ons.gov.uk
• Statistics Canada, Census 2021: visible minority and Indigenous identity www12.statcan.gc.ca
• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Census 2021: cultural diversity (ancestry) abs.gov.au
• IBGE, Censo 2022: cor ou raça agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br
• Statistics South Africa, Census 2022: population group census.statssa.gov.za
• Singapore Department of Statistics, Census of Population 2020: ethnic group singstat.gov.sg
• Department of Statistics Malaysia, Census 2020: ethnic composition dosm.gov.my
• Group name pools reuse the existing per-people pools; some names appear in several groups on purpose census.gov

Fertility and childlessness

• Hajnal 1965, European marriage patterns in perspective: 10-20% of women never married in north-western Europe before 1940; permanent celibacy and male excess childlessness elsewhere (polygyny, later male marriage) from Bongaarts & Potter and the DHS men's surveys — Childlessness floors: 4% of women and 12% of men everywhere, 12% of women and 18% of men in Europe before 1950 en.wikipedia.org
• Childlessness by completed fertility: US CPS June 2018 (15% of women 40-44 childless, 35% with two children); NSFG (one in four men vs one in six women childless at 40-49); Sobotka, Childlessness in Europe 1900-1972 cohorts (12-14% Nordic, >20% Germany/Switzerland/Spain 1970 cohort, ~27% Japan); Nigeria DHS (under 3% of women 45-49 childless) census.gov
• Distribution of completed family size (Human Fertility Database; Wrigley & Schofield parity distributions) — Completed family size varies with a standard deviation of roughly 0.45 x mean + 0.5 children: about 1.5 for a mean of 2 and 3.2 for a mean of 6. Men's counts spread about 40% wider than women's. humanfertility.org
• UN World Population Prospects 2024 via Our World in Data, total fertility rate 1950-2023 — World 4.9 (1950) to 2.3 (2020); high-income 1.6, low-income 4.5-6 ourworldindata.org
• Gapminder, children per woman 1800-1950 (historical reconstructions) — Pre-transition societies 5-7; England ~5 in 1800, ~3.5 by 1900; France fell first (~4.4 in 1800 to ~2.8 by 1900) gapminder.org
• Bocquet-Appel, Neolithic Demographic Transition (2011) — Fertility rose with sedentism: foragers ~5, early farmers ~6.5-7 doi.org
• Kaplan et al., hunter-gatherer fertility (Hadza, !Kung, Ache) — Completed fertility 4.7 (!Kung) to 8 (Ache); ~5.5 typical en.wikipedia.org
• Wrigley & Schofield, Population History of England 1541-1871 — Early modern England TFR 4.2-5.5 depending on marriage age en.wikipedia.org

Flags

• Flag images from Flagpedia (flagcdn.com), keyed by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code; England, Scotland and Wales use their ISO 3166-2 codes flagpedia.net
• Historical flags: the flag image (P41) recorded on each state's Wikidata item, preferring the latest-dated flag, served from Wikimedia Commons wikidata.org

How common each profession was

• Broadberry, Campbell & van Leeuwen (2013), sectoral shares of the British labour force 1381-1851 — Agriculture 57% (1381), 58% (1522), 55% (1700), 37% (1759), 35% (1801), 24% (1851) sciencedirect.com
• Our World in Data / ILO, employment in agriculture by country income level — Low-income ~60%, lower-middle ~40%, upper-middle ~20%, high-income ~3% (2020) ourworldindata.org
• ILOSTAT, employment by ISCO-08 major group, 2020 — High-income: professionals 22%, service and sales 20%, technicians 15%, clerks 9%, craft 10%, operators 7%, elementary 8%, managers 7% ilostat.ilo.org
• Scheidel, The Roman economy; Hopkins on urbanisation — Roman Empire 80-90% rural; slaves 10-15% of population, up to 30% in Italy en.wikipedia.org
• Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past; Qing occupational structure — Ming-Qing China ~85-90% agricultural households en.wikipedia.org
• Whittle (2024), women's work in early modern England — Women's recorded work: housework, dairy, textiles, retail; used for femaleShare overrides onlinelibrary.wiley.com

Human height

• CDC 2000 growth charts, median stature for age (boys and girls, birth to 20 years) — Expressed as the fraction of adult median height reached at each age; applied to every population's adult mean so a child's height at death scales with their nation and era cdc.gov
• NCD Risk Factor Collaboration (2016), A century of trends in adult human height — Mean male height by birth cohort 1896-1996; within-population standard deviation about 7.6 cm for men and 7.1 cm for women; men average 12 cm taller than women (1996 cohort: 171 vs 159 cm) doi.org
• Our World in Data, Human Height (Clark 2008; Steckel 2001 skeletal estimates) — Mesolithic Europe 168 cm, Neolithic Europe 167, Predynastic Egypt 165, Dynastic Egypt 166, Bronze Age Anatolia and Greece 166, Harappa 169, Yayoi Japan 161, medieval Japan 159, Edo Japan 158, Pacific Islands 173-174, early modern Holland 167, Norway 165, London 170 ourworldindata.org

Human physical appearance

• humanphenotypes.net, physical traits sections of 209 regional phenotype pages (a compendium of 20th-century anthropological typologies after Eickstedt, Biasutti, Coon, Birdsell, Vallois and Knussmann); wording rewritten from craniometric jargon into plain description humanphenotypes.net

Infant and child mortality

• Coale & Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (West), 2nd ed. — q0 and 4q1 read off the West female/male average at each e0 level jstor.org

Languages

• Wikipedia language articles; Glottolog for classification glottolog.org

Languages spoken by nation

• CIA World Factbook, Languages field by country (public domain), via the factbook.json mirror — Percentages are used as given. Where the Factbook lists languages without shares, the entry is either marked estimated (weights are an estimate of first-language shares made without a census figure, not a statistic) or marked equalWeights (no estimate made, listed languages weighted equally). cia.gov
• 1897 Russian Empire census, population by native language en.wikipedia.org
• 1910 Austria-Hungary census, mother tongue (ww1.habsburger.net) ww1.habsburger.net
• 1989 Soviet census, population by nationality en.wikipedia.org
• Ottoman Empire 1912 ethnic estimate (The New Armenia), Demographics of the Ottoman Empire en.wikipedia.org
• Frier and Harper, Roman Empire population by Latin West and Greek East en.wikipedia.org
• Xiong & Zhang 2012, proportions of first-language speakers of Chinese varieties (Language Atlas of China) en.wikipedia.org

Names: Africa

• Meroitic and Nubian royal names (Kingdom of Kush king lists) en.wikipedia.org
• Ge'ez and Amharic names; Ethiopian naming (given name + father's given name) en.wikipedia.org
• Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Akan, Fon, Kongo, Zulu, Shona, Swahili, Somali, Wolof, Mandinka, Kanuri naming (Behind the Name; Wikipedia articles on each naming convention) en.wikipedia.org
• Malagasy names en.wikipedia.org
• African American given names and surnames (US Census 2010 surname data by race) en.wikipedia.org

Names: East and Southeast Asia

• List of common Chinese surnames (Ministry of Public Security 2019 ranking) en.wikipedia.org
• Chinese given names: Han and Tang era attested names (Shiji, Hanshu, Jiu Tangshu) en.wikipedia.org
• Japanese names, most common surnames (Meiji Yasuda Life survey) en.wikipedia.org
• Korean names, 2015 census surname distribution en.wikipedia.org
• Vietnamese names, surname distribution en.wikipedia.org
• Mongolian, Manchu, Tibetan, Old Turkic names (Secret History of the Mongols; Orkhon inscriptions) en.wikipedia.org
• Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Lao, Malay, Javanese, Filipino naming conventions en.wikipedia.org

Names: Europe

• Roman naming conventions: praenomina, nomina gentilicia, cognomina en.wikipedia.org
• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford) lgpn.ox.ac.uk
• Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England pase.ac.uk
• Behind the Name, European given names by language behindthename.com
• Wikipedia, lists of most common surnames in Europe en.wikipedia.org
• Old Norse names (Viking Society; Landnámabók) en.wikipedia.org
• Gaulish and Celtic names (Delamarre, Noms de personnes celtiques) en.wikipedia.org

Names: Oceania

• Polynesian and Māori names (Te Aka Māori Dictionary; Behind the Name) en.wikipedia.org
• Australian and New Zealand most common surnames (Australian Bureau of Statistics; Statistics NZ) en.wikipedia.org

Names: South Asia

• Sanskrit and Prakrit personal names from inscriptions and epics (Mahabharata, Ashokan edicts, Gupta inscriptions) en.wikipedia.org
• Most common Indian surnames by state (Census of India-derived summaries) en.wikipedia.org
• Tamil Sangam-era names (Sangam literature; Purananuru) en.wikipedia.org
• Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Telugu, Kannada, Sinhala, Nepali, Pashto naming conventions en.wikipedia.org

Names: further peoples

• Behind the Name and Wikipedia naming articles for Fula, Mossi, Ewe, Luo, Ganda, Kinyarwanda, Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa, Dinka, Hadza, Mbuti, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Chechen, Balinese, Sundanese, Batak, Navajo, Cherokee, Ojibwe, Apache, Hawaiian, Fijian, Samoan and Tongan given names behindthename.com

Names: prehistory

• No names survive from preliterate societies; these pools are invented from short open syllables and are marked synthetic. en.wikipedia.org
• Proto-Indo-European reconstructed name elements (Mallory & Adams, Oxford Introduction to PIE) — Used for Yamnaya, Corded Ware and Andronovo pools en.wikipedia.org
• Ainu and Jōmon naming (Batchelor, Ainu-English dictionary) en.wikipedia.org

Names: present day

• Present-day given and family names for nations whose older pools were dominated by historical or neighbouring names: national statistics, Forebears surname rankings and Behind the Name usage lists for each country forebears.io

Names: the Americas

• US 19th-century surnames: 1850-1880 federal census surname frequencies (Anglo, Irish, German and Scandinavian stock) en.wikipedia.org
• Nahuatl, Maya, Mixtec, Zapotec, Quechua, Aymara, Muisca, Taíno, Tupi-Guaraní given names (Wikipedia and Behind the Name) en.behindthename.com
• Lakota, Haudenosaunee, Algonquian, Puebloan names (tribal language dictionaries; Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org
• US Census, most common surnames 2010; Social Security Administration popular given names by decade ssa.gov
• Most common surnames in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Peru (national registries) en.wikipedia.org

Names: the Middle East

• Sumerian and Akkadian personal names (Wikipedia lists; Oriental Institute name corpora) en.wikipedia.org
• Ancient Egyptian personal names (Ranke, Die ägyptischen Personennamen) en.wikipedia.org
• Behind the Name, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Armenian, Georgian given names behindthename.com
• Wikipedia, Arabic name (ism, nasab) and Turkish name en.wikipedia.org
• Most common surnames in Turkey, Iran, Israel (national statistics summaries on Wikipedia) en.wikipedia.org

Naming customs

• Yoruba naming ceremony (isomoloruko) on the eighth day; Akan outdooring on the eighth day; Igbo naming on the eighth day — The child is not named until it has shown it will stay; earlier deaths are of an unnamed child en.wikipedia.org
• Aqiqah: Muslim naming on the seventh day after birth en.wikipedia.org
• Brit milah on the eighth day for Jewish boys; girls named at the next Torah reading en.wikipedia.org
• Namakarana, the Hindu naming rite on the eleventh or twelfth day en.wikipedia.org
• Oshichiya meimeishiki, the Japanese naming on the seventh night; genpuku adult names for samurai boys at 12-16 simple.wikipedia.org
• Dies lustricus: Roman naming on the eighth day for girls and ninth for boys en.wikipedia.org
• Amphidromia and dekate: Athenian naming feast around the tenth day en.wikipedia.org
• Guan Li capping ceremony at 20 with a courtesy name (zi) for educated Chinese men; milk names until the full-month (manyue) celebration en.wikipedia.org
• Ainu children unnamed for two to three years, with protective nicknames until then tota.world
• Plains vision quest: young men receive or change their name on the experience britannica.com
• Ethiopian Orthodox baptism and naming at 40 days for boys and 80 for girls; Orthodox baptism on the eighth or fortieth day; Latin Christian baptism within days of birth en.wikipedia.org
• Aztec naming on the fourth day after birth by the tonalpohualli day-sign; Inca rutuchikuy first-haircut naming at about two years en.wikipedia.org
• Delayed naming as a response to infant mortality (Coster, Kennesaw genealogical study; Stone, symbolic reincarnation) digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu

Nations

• Name pool size scales with each nation's estimated births (log scale, 5 to 100 names per type) en.wikipedia.org

Population and births by era

• Literacy rates (seventh column): Our World in Data cross-country literacy rates (Buringh & van Zanden 2009 for Western Europe 1475-1800; Clio Infra and UNESCO 1820-2024), used wherever a nation maps to a modern country ourworldindata.org
• Which societies had writing: Wikipedia, History of writing and Timeline of writing systems (Sumer c. 3300 BC, Egypt 3200 BC, Indus 2600 BC, Shang China 1200 BC, Olmec/Zapotec c. 600 BC, Maya 300 BC, Meroitic 300 BC, Ge'ez, Old Turkic 700s, runes and ogham, Cyrillic 890s, Tibetan 650); societies without a script (Andean states, North American cultures, Iron Age Celts and Germans, steppe nomads, Pacific peoples) hold zero literacy until writing arrived en.wikipedia.org
• van Leeuwen & van Leeuwen-Li, Education since 1820, in van Zanden et al. (eds), How Was Life? Global Well-being since 1820 (OECD/Clio Infra 2014), Table 5.3: share with at least basic education by region 1870-1950 (Western Europe 60 to 91, Eastern Europe 25 to 97, Western Offshoots 82 to 100, Latin America 13.5 to 54, East Asia 24 to 46, South and South-East Asia 1.8 to 20, Middle East and North Africa 4 to 14, Sub-Saharan Africa 1.8 to 13); used to calibrate the 1800-1950 regional priors where no country series exists doi.org
• Pre-modern literacy priors by region and era, adjusted by wealth: Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989; Rome and Athens about 10%); Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China (1979; about 20% overall); Rubinger, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan (2007; Edo 25-35%); Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (1969); Buringh & van Zanden 2009; UNESCO regional estimates for 1900-1950 en.wikipedia.org
• PRB, How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? (2022) — Every nation row holds births in millions over the period, computed as population x years x crude birth rate. The birth rate is what turns population into births and is where lifespan enters: a stationary population has a birth rate near 1000 divided by life expectancy, so short-lived eras produce far more births per head (42-45 per 1000 before 1600, 40 to 1900, then UN rates down to 17 today). Before 1950 the period rate applies to every nation, but each row is then scaled by the period mean life expectancy over its own, so shorter-lived nations receive proportionally more of the period's births; from 1950 each country uses its own UN birth rate year by year, extended from the 2023 data through 2026. PRB uses 80/1000 before 1200; a stationary population with e0 of 25-30 implies 35-45/1000, which is used here. prb.org
• HYDE 3.3 / McEvedy & Jones, Atlas of World Population History (1978) — World and regional totals 10,000 BC to 1900 en.wikipedia.org
• Maddison Project, regional population and GDP per capita 1-2008 — Wealth levels: 1 < $800, 2 < $2,000, 3 < $5,000, 4 < $15,000, 5 above (1990 international dollars) en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia lists of countries by population in 1000, 1500, 1600, 1700, 1800, 1900 en.wikipedia.org
• Population history of China (census table) en.wikipedia.org
• Demographics of India, historical population (Maddison, Durand, Biraben) en.wikipedia.org
• Medieval demography (European totals by century) en.wikipedia.org
• Demography of the Roman Empire (Frier, Harper) en.wikipedia.org
• Population history of Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Denevan 1992) en.wikipedia.org
• Our World in Data, population (UN WPP 2024 and HYDE) 1900-2023 ourworldindata.org
• Our World in Data, life expectancy (Riley 2005, Clio Infra, UN WPP 2024) ourworldindata.org
• Life expectancy variation over time (Wikipedia summary of paleodemographic estimates) — Paleolithic 22-33, Neolithic 20-33, Bronze/Iron 26, Rome 20-33, medieval Europe 30-35, early modern England 33-40 en.wikipedia.org
• UN World Population Prospects 2024 via Our World in Data, crude birth rate by country 1950-2023 — Crude birth rate per 1,000: 1900 ~40, 1950 37, 1970 32, 1990 26, 2000 21, 2010 20, 2020 17 ourworldindata.org

Professions

• Literacy score 1-10 per profession: how much reading and writing the work itself required (scribes, clergy, clerks and professionals at 9-10; merchants and shopkeepers 6-7; skilled trades 3-5; farm, herding and unskilled labour 1-2), following Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (1969) and Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order (1980) on occupational literacy gradients en.wikipedia.org
• ILO ISCO-08 occupational classification — Modern occupation categories and titles ilo.org
• Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, occupational structure of Britain 1379-1911 campop.geog.cam.ac.uk
• US Census 1900 occupation tables (Historical Statistics of the United States) census.gov

Speculative and simulated life

• Intelligence levels: level 0 is life without a nervous system (plants, mosses and fungi, counts from the animals table); each level is anchored to Earth animal groups of comparable cognition and weighted by the global head counts compiled for hard mode (Rosenberg 2023, van den Hoogen 2019, Schultheiss 2022, Callaghan 2021, Greenspoon 2023, FAO). Level 10 has no Earth example; its weight is set equal to human numbers as a guess en.wikipedia.org
• Simulation share, home worlds and the birth window are speculative: 95% simulated after Bostrom's simulation argument; homes follow no data, with the rest of the Solar System limited to a 0.1% chance on an icy moon, on the assumption that Earth holds its only life; the birth window spans 1 billion BC to 5 billion AD, roughly the remaining habitable life of the Sun en.wikipedia.org

When states existed

• Wikipedia infobox dates for each polity (founding and dissolution years, conventional dating) — Only nations with a conventionally accepted start or end year are listed; archaeological cultures and vague regional groupings are left open. BC years are negative. A birth year is confined to the overlap of the nation's lifespan and the period. en.wikipedia.org