The best short answer is: about 117 billion humans have ever been born. That is not a count from ancient paperwork. It is a demographic estimate, built from assumptions about when Homo sapiens began, how many people were alive at different times, and how many babies were born per 1,000 people in each period.

The Population Reference Bureau puts the estimate at 117,020,448,575 people ever born by 2022. At that time, about 7.96 billion people were alive, so the living made up about 6.8 percent of everyone who had ever been born. So the rough picture is clear: in PRB’s 2022 estimate, nearly 7 percent of all humans ever born were alive, while well over 100 billion humans had already died.

Do not treat 117 billion as exact. PRB says the calculation is part science and part art, because there are no demographic data for more than 99 percent of the span of human existence. Scientific American makes the same caution in a different way: the answer depends on where you start counting, whether you count only Homo sapiens, and what birth rates you assume for the deep past.

The number is not much larger because human populations were small for most of history. PRB estimates about 5 million people around 8000 B.C.E., about 300 million around 1 C.E., and about 1 billion only after 1800. The recent population boom is enormous, but it sits on top of a very long past when far fewer humans were alive at any one time.

So where did the people who are not alive now go? At the broadest level, they died in different places, cultures, and eras. After death, the body no longer maintains itself. Britannica explains that enzymes begin breaking down oxygen-starved cells, bacteria spread through the body, and decomposition can reduce soft tissue while the skeleton remains for a time.

The path after death is not the same for everyone. Some bodies decomposed after burial. Some were burned or cremated, which affects what remains and how decomposition proceeds. Some were preserved by cold, dryness, acidity, embalming, or mummification. Durham University’s forensic archaeology material notes that skeletons can survive in the ground for centuries, while soil chemistry, temperature, insects, water, burning, and other conditions affect what happens.

That is the practical answer to “where did they go.” There is no single destination described by science. The living fraction is small; the rest died, and their bodies followed different physical paths: decomposition, preservation, cremation, or skeletal survival under particular conditions.

The exact number will shift as estimates improve and the living population changes. But the scale is stable enough to remember: in PRB’s estimate, the living are only a small slice of everyone who has ever been born.

References

1. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? | Population Reference Bureau
2. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth? | Scientific American
3. What Happens to Our Bodies After We Die? | Britannica
4. What happens to human bodies after death? | FutureLearn

Explore More

• Why did human population grow so slowly for most of history?
• How do demographers estimate ancient populations without censuses?
• Could the number of people alive ever exceed the number of people who have died?
• Why do some bodies become mummies instead of decomposing normally?
• What happens to bones after centuries underground?