Don't forget the population difference. There are a lot more people now than back then. (I intentional didn't specify world population of some subset - interesting to think about each)
There are way more people around now than there were then—the number of people alive today is comparable to the number of people who have died in the last millennium.
There's also over a billion more people in the world now... does that matter? Maybe not, but I always wonder when raw counts are compared across decades
The last 200 years are special. We've gone from 1 billion to 7 billion people. It's hard to compare that with a period of time when there were only ~200 million people.
In the last 70 years alone we've added over 5 billion people. In the 1800s there were vast swaths of temperate, fertile land that were basically unclaimed. Moving around was no big deal at that scale.
Now we have people everywhere (that doesn't suck; and even some places that do). We have social programs and expensive infrastructure. The world is very different now than even 100 years ago.
A large chunk of that is simply differences in population sizes. The current US population is likely larger than the global population in 1,000 CE. Further, children used to make up a larger chunk of the population exaggerating the differences.
So, it was often possible to scale up production even more, but there where not enough customers to justify it.
On the other hand, there were far fewer people who lived through it. From 3000 BC to 500 BC the global population went from 14 million to 100 million. Today there are just short of 8,000 million people, i.e. 80-570x as many. On the day Ur was founded, there were fewer people living on the entire planet than there are living in some modern cities. So in terms of the number of human stories being told, we are racing past the ancients at hundreds of times the rate. We have far more history per second than they do.
I was curious so I correlated it against world population, and it still grows a lot. from 5ish events per billion around 1500 to 100 or so per billion now. That said, record keeping biases make a straightforward comparison fairly meaningless.
Add that that humans millions years ago were not in billions as today. They were actually in very small numbers, like tens of thousands on the entire planet.
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