Not that it’s relevant, but the claim that malaria has killed half of humans who have lived is completely absurd. Falciparum malaria is nasty because it has only recently jumped to humans. With time, it would adapt to be less deadly, to better spread, and humans would adapt to be less vulnerable. This is exactly what happened to vivax (“benign”) malaria. Vivax jumped to humans 35k years ago, while falciparum only 5k years ago. The genus Homo was free of malaria for millions of years. If you define humans as starting 50k years ago, then some form of malaria was present for most of that time, although how deadly it was varied a lot over the millennia.
That’s true, the population estimates used in the models James cites are dominated by the agricultural era. But the claim that half of deaths are due to malaria is based on the contrary assumption that most humans lived in subsaharan Africa.
Here is some commentary on the two most popular models.
Not that it’s relevant, but the claim that malaria has killed half of humans who have lived is completely absurd. Falciparum malaria is nasty because it has only recently jumped to humans. With time, it would adapt to be less deadly, to better spread, and humans would adapt to be less vulnerable. This is exactly what happened to vivax (“benign”) malaria. Vivax jumped to humans 35k years ago, while falciparum only 5k years ago. The genus Homo was free of malaria for millions of years. If you define humans as starting 50k years ago, then some form of malaria was present for most of that time, although how deadly it was varied a lot over the millennia.
Given population growth, it’s not obvious to me that more people lived until 5k years ago than since then.
That’s true, the population estimates used in the models James cites are dominated by the agricultural era. But the claim that half of deaths are due to malaria is based on the contrary assumption that most humans lived in subsaharan Africa.
Here is some commentary on the two most popular models.
Go and look at the estimates. They have already been made and are easily found with the usual method.