“Any Human Ever”

Ever wonder how life would turn out for you if you could literally be dropped into the live of any person ever? Well, there’s a tool that lets you envision just that: Any Human Ever.

History, let’s face it, is a collection of stories. We walk around with a grab bag of anecdotes in our heads: Abraham Lincoln kept his papers in his top hat, Henry VIII’s leg smelled terrible, Vikings didn’t actually have horns on their helmets, and so on. For many of us, this set of stories is part factoid, part anecdote, and part moral arc.

But as a depiction of reality, it’s a statistician’s nightmare. The stories that we call history are a deeply biased sample, selected for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with fairly representing our collective past. We know far more about the sequence of Frankish kings than we do about a typical peasant’s routine in 5th century Avignon. Think of your notion of history, and contrast it to the fact that most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief. You knew that thing about the Vikings’ helmets, but how much could you say about the unrecorded 99% of past humanity?

The site uses statistical information to generate a representative “life” each time you run it. These are not real lives, just lives that you might have reasonably expected to live had you been randomly born at any other point in human history. I ran the experiment one time, and I “became” a Chinese woman named Ping who lived in the third century CE:

Ping was born in 237 CE, in the countryside near Chengdu. Her village held about 250 people. She lived in a rammed-earth courtyard house. Among four children, Ping was the third. She was 17 years old when her mother died. Her food was mostly rice, pork, and pickled mustard greens, with citrus and loquat in season. She stood some 152 cm tall (5 ft 0 in).

At 21, she married. Ping’s one child, a son, did not live past childhood. Her farthest journey was a day’s walk, to a neighbouring village. She spoke a Sinitic language with a Ba-Shu substratum; her faith was ancestor worship and early Confucianism. She spent her days as a farmer and silk-raiser.

Death came at 24, of complications of childbirth. After death, she was buried in the family’s ground in a wooden coffin, the grave tended and offerings left there each spring.

Here’s the result from my second iteration:

Iara was born in the countryside near Manaus, in 1622 CE. She grew up in a village of about 250 people. Her dwelling was a palm-thatched communal maloca. She was the second of six children. She was 30 when her father died. Iara’s diet was mostly manioc (cassava) bread, game and forest birds, river fish, and peppers and palm hearts, with palm fruits, pineapple, and guava in season. Her height was about 162 cm (5 ft 4 in).

Iara married at 14, sharing the household with co-wives. Of the three children she had, a boy and a girl survived past childhood. The limit of her travels was half a day’s walk, to a neighbouring village. Iara spoke an Arawakan language and followed Christianity. By occupation she was a gardener of manioc and maize. At 18, Iara lived through a cold, sunless year caused by the far-off eruption of Parker in the Philippines.

She died at 34, of complications of childbirth. Her body was afterwards buried in consecrated ground beside the church, in a shroud, and later in a coffin.

And one more. This one turned out short:

Selvan was born in 1298 CE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Badami. His town was home to about 3,000 people. Among seven children, he was the seventh. Selvan died at 1, of malaria. After death, he was buried rather than burned for a child who had not yet had the tonsure.

Sobering, but fascinating.

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