Behind a universal veil of ignorance you could be born as anyone who has ever lived — weighted not by the centuries, but by the sheer number of births in each. So where, when, and into what would the draw most likely place you?
The lottery is decided by where the births are — and most births happened long ago, under high mortality. The Neolithic alone outweighs every century since. Each bar is the number of humans born in that era.
Cross every region with every era, rank the results by how many people were born into each, and the abstraction becomes ten real lives. These are the most likely circumstances of your birth — and almost every one is a farmer, long ago, somewhere in Asia.
Each era's births are spread across the real world by that region's share of the living population. Drag the slider or press play to follow the odds across 12 eras. Click any country to chart its share through all of history — or switch to cumulative for the running total.
A region is painted onto today's country borders just to help you orient — it's an approximation. Those borders didn't exist for most of history, and each country is coloured by its whole macro-region, not by itself. (Russia is shown with the Eurasian steppe.)
Because the draw is overwhelmingly pre-modern, the typical circumstances are nearly fixed regardless of region: subsistence, illiteracy, and a coin-flip on surviving childhood. Figures are birth-weighted across all of history.
At subsistence — the standard of living that defined nearly all of humanity until two centuries ago.
Roughly one in two children died before age 15 for most of human history. Your own odds of reaching adulthood were little better than a coin toss.
Literacy was the privilege of a tiny elite. The overwhelming majority of humans who ever lived never read or wrote.
A middle-income lifestyle or better — electricity, public sanitation, clean water, enough to eat — is a creature of the last few generations. Birth-weighted across everyone who ever lived, the comforts most readers take for granted are vanishingly rare.
The fun — and sobering — question: what were the odds the draw made you something other than a farmer? These are rough order-of-magnitude estimates from historical class structures, not the core birth model, but the scale is the point.
Each press samples a real birth from the full distribution — first an era, then a region within it, then your fortunes within that world. Press until the abstraction becomes a person.
The birth totals per era are well documented. The split into regions is an estimate, so the model carries that uncertainty explicitly. Here's exactly how it works.
Births per era come straight from the Population Reference Bureau. Each era's births are split across regions by that era's share of the living population — a stated proxy for its share of births. Cumulative births in a region are simply:
Ranges come from a Monte-Carlo: each era's shares and birth total are perturbed by log-normal noise whose width grows for older, less certain eras (σ from 0.03 today up to 0.45 in the Paleolithic), renormalized, and summed over 4,000 draws. We report the median and the 5th–95th percentile.