Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived
192 points by thinkingemote 4 hours ago | 94 comments

jorisboris 30 seconds ago
My daughter is four.

I drew a boy who lived 11000 years ago in Mexico.

His longest travel was a half day walk carried by his family to a nearby foraging ground.

He died at 4 from a zoonotic fever. Both parents outlived him.

It’s random, it’s ai generated. Makes me appreciate life nevertheless.

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magneticnorth 2 hours ago
This is neat, but I don't think it's actually drawing the year from the correct probability distribution - "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct, but in 5 "random" choices, only one was from anywhere near modern day.
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WA 3 minutes ago
There are more statistical issues. I drew a person from 1984, living in Germany and recalculated their life several times. In almost all cases, their mother died while they were in their thirties, often both parents. This is simply far from reality.
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zhoBEENG 52 minutes ago
I did a statistical analysis and you are correct. The issue seems to be that crude birth rates from around 500CE and earlier are overestimated significantly. The bad source seems to be Kaneda & Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?", where they assume a flat crude birth rate of 80 for all BCE dates. The probability distribution is just a function of pop and CBR, so it results in significantly decreasing modern birth probabilities.
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yummypaint 51 minutes ago
The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.
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magneticnorth 34 minutes ago
This is a good point, it's not as far off as it seems from a quick glance.
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Supermancho 44 minutes ago
> "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is correct,

If the selection is from the population at random (as the UI indicates), but it specifically says it's based on a random year (during which humans were present) first as a filter. It's much more likely to select far from the population explosion.

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mannykannot 2 hours ago
I guess you are right, but it makes it more interesting if the picks are not almost all from the recent past. On the other hand, I would also guess that spreading the picks evenly across the time range might result in many being from times with little data to differentiate them.
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benatkin 8 minutes ago
It makes the premise of the entire site flawed, though. And it defeats the purpose of the convenient button provided to redraw a year. That is what should allow you to find a pick that might be more interesting, rather than messing up the randomness promised by the site and the HN title.
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wat10000 2 hours ago
How near is near? With ~100 billion people having ever lived, the odds of a randomly selected life falling within the past couple of centuries are not all that high.
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riazrizvi 53 minutes ago
Okay step away from the waving hands and read the source material.
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wat10000 40 minutes ago
Could you be a little more specific? https://www.prb.org/news/how-many-people-have-ever-lived-on-... puts the halfway point at over 2,000 years ago, so you'd expect less than 50% probability of getting a random year that's not BCE. "A random birth is far more likely to fall near the present" is true in relative terms; the timeline on the web site goes back 300,000 years and you're very likely to get something in the past few thousand years, which is pretty near to the present when compared to a third of a million years. The random years it gives me fit into that pretty well, so I guessed that the person I replied to might be using a narrower definition of "anywhere near modern day" than that. Hence why I asked. If I missed something, could you kindly point out what I missed, instead of whatever this is?
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estetlinus 15 minutes ago
Very nice idea!

I think some number are of by a magnitude (DIED BEFORE AGE 5: 4%, for Scandinavium in 1990 - according to UN it’s ~0.6%).

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pavel_lishin 3 hours ago
This could be pretty great for a play through of Thousand Year Old Vampire, a pretty terrific journaling game: https://thousandyearoldvampire.com/

And I suppose other RPGs, too, especially ones that are more story-than-dice driven, and/or set in the "real" world.

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gilleain 3 hours ago
This can be great - Tom from the Yogscast has run a few of these, and they can get pretty wild. It's a simple premise but works well.
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scottmcmac 3 hours ago
"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"

I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...

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spullara 2 hours ago
All babies were exclusively breastfed in 3064 BCE.
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Sharlin 21 minutes ago
Yeah, it doesn't give totally absurd combinations (like a male dying of birth complications at age 10), but the probabilities are still likely rather rough approximations (eg. sorting cause-of-death distributions to a few bins like "infant", "child", "adult", "elder").
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hliyan 2 hours ago
Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.
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coldtea 2 hours ago
Hmm, I was at the Korean Penisula too. How representatively random is this thing?
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ajmurmann 32 minutes ago
I died at age 36 of a workplace accident in the Yangtze delta in the year 700
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AnnikaL 59 minutes ago
I died of malaria at age 1 in the West African Sahel!
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bena 2 hours ago
I died at 1 in Mesopotamia in 3966 BCE of dysentery.
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nickdirienzo 33 minutes ago
This is really neat. It would be interesting to talk with the character generated.
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bentt 3 hours ago
We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed. No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.

I loved it and feel inspired from it.

(It looks like it's getting a lot of traffic and might get hugged to death)

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petilon 24 minutes ago
> We might recognize that the economics of making such a fascinating and artful experiment like this have completely changed.

And this is not limited to software development. In just a few years, the economics of delivering healthcare, education, entertainment and legal services are going to change completely. Transportation is changing as we speak. In a decade Physical AI will completely change the economics of manufacturing, food services, elder care, and so on.

The post-scarcity world will be here sooner than we think!

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pavel_lishin 3 hours ago
> No ads. Not asking for anything except your attention, and then delivering an outcome that is fascinating and honestly, far beyond what a person would be incentivized to build before AI tooling.

I don't think I agree. There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.

I'm not sure why AI means that people don't need to support their creations with ads. Sure, it probably took fewer human-hours typing at a keyboard to create this, but for things like this, a labor of love, that's typically not the "expensive" part.

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personjerry 2 hours ago
> There were plenty of interesting side-projects on the internet before AI.

This is a strawman.

The original point was "the economics ... have changed"

I read this as, it's much easier to spin up a project of this scale even non-monetized, and more people are able and willing to do so.

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pavel_lishin 2 hours ago
Yes, it's easier - but I'm not sure what that has to do with ads or asking for things beyond attention.
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retsibsi 45 minutes ago
I think it's just that in the past, you would need X free time, Y motivation level, and Z skill level (partly tradeable for X and Y) to create something like this, and now all of those values are smaller. So it's 'economics' in the straightforward sense, because not everyone could afford to spend X hours on something they weren't going to monetize, and also in the sense of the incentives shaping people's productive/creative activity.

(As for whether it's a good thing, I'm conflicted. It's cool to see more stuff like this, but if it crowds out the more intense passion projects, we lose something too.)

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personjerry 55 minutes ago
I believe that part serves to emphasize the main point.

To elucidate for this particular example, before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.

Now that the barrier is much lower, the creator didn't mind spinning up and providing it with no monetization (e.g. no ads).

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bentt 49 minutes ago
> before AI agents existed, projects with this level of data and depth might've needed to be monetized in order to justify the resources to bring it to life.

Yes, this was exactly what I meant in OP.

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AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago
In fact, there was a time when the internet was mostly interesting side projects, if you go back far enough (the mid 1990s, say).
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bentt 51 minutes ago
It’s true. It feels like that age may be revisiting us. Makes me happy to see stuff like this which isn’t upselling something.
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zeristor 17 minutes ago
Roy: A Life from Ricky and Morty comes to mind.

Extra points if you can take your example life off grid.

https://youtube.com/shorts/CssbcJ44dos

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visiondude 14 minutes ago
“He was born and died at 1 of dysentery.“ - lucky me
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john_strinlai 3 hours ago
>You have drawn a boy, born in the Korean Peninsula in 3394 BCE

>Life expectancy at birth: 28 yrs

>Died before age 5: 42%

>Died before age 15: 50%

i knew life expectancy was obviously lower, but those stats were a bit eye opening.

unfortunately, died at 3 from an accident.

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glenstein 3 hours ago
I do wonder if that life expectancy is dragged significantly down by all the ways you can die early on in life, so that it's not so much that 28 years is an old age for the time as it is a function of all things that prevent you from getting to old age.

And so if you went to a town square or market in that time (if it's a time that had such a thing), perhaps it might still be perfectly normal to see people in their 30s, 40s, 50s.

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zorked 21 minutes ago
The website represents this well. My random person was born in the Neolithic and lived to 68. Not bad.
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coldtea 2 hours ago
That's exactly the case. Overall average life expenctancy as adult didn't change much from older times - about 15 years more.
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bena 2 hours ago
That's exactly what happens.

The life expectancy of a person who lives to 18 increases dramatically across the board.

You even see this today. If you live to 70, you can expect to live 14 to 17 more years. So to about 84 on the short side and 87 on the long side.

However, make it to 75, your life expectancy is 11 to 14 years. Which is 86 on the short side and 89 on the long side.

Basically, the longer you live, the longer you should live, but eventually the range collapses. And that's because people come in under the average all the time. Some people die at 71. And those people stop getting counted when determining life expectancy at 75.

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wat10000 2 hours ago
Right, that 42% dying before age 5 means the survivors typically lived well beyond 28. There weren’t a huge number of people living into their 80s, but 28 wouldn’t have been “old man” territory.
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hliyan 2 hours ago
I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.
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scottmcmac 3 hours ago
My first run got Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE...

That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...

"Any Korean Ever"

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_air 44 minutes ago
It's funny to pick a birth year from our era and think of how history will represent us:

Martha was born in the countryside near Short Pump, in 1993 CE. Her village holds about 300 people. She makes her home in a timber-framed detached house. Martha has neither brothers nor sisters. She eats mostly wheat bread and maize, pork and dairy, and potatoes and garden vegetables, with apples in season, and coffee, soft drinks and snack foods too. She knows her letters. Her height is about 171 cm (5 ft 7 in).

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xattt 28 minutes ago
An “Eastern Woodlands” person born 1989 is recorded to have experienced a “volcanic winter” and “dimmed sky” at age 2 as a result of the eruption of Mount Pinatubo.

This is an… interesting contextualization.

I am wondering how many historical situations are sexed up to be something significant, yet were nothing to write home about in the moment. All it took was a historian with an active imagination to bring it to the forefront.

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xiaoyu2006 2 hours ago
I am really happy to live in the modern age. It is quite amazing to think that people are facing cardiovascular disease and cancer instead of random parasites nowadays. Modern medicine is such a miracle.
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thoman23 2 hours ago
> instead of random parasites nowadays

Maybe MAHA will bring this back, like they did measles.

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Perz1val 2 hours ago
How many random parasites has modern medicine removed from you? Likely you never even had one. It's not just medicine, we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing
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rc5150 50 minutes ago
>we also have abundant, safe food, clean water and warm housing

for now

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sph 36 minutes ago
Since this website has information about how many children born per woman, and how many survive on average, I would like to see a tool that, given a particular person, can estimate how many people today are their genetic descendant.
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glenstein 3 hours ago
Now this is fun vibe coding. A fascinating way of reckoning with our cosmic luck. On "only the first roll counts" rules, I rolled a girl who died at 8 months from a respiratory infection in the Indus valley, in 7785 BCE (9,810 years ago).

I rolled again, of course, but at that point it feels like fishing for a best case scenario. But I at least got someone from the North China Plain in 75 BCE who lived to 74 and had 6 grand children. Married at 19 and stayed married to age 71. Hard to hope for better than that, against these odds at least.

Edit: Obviously progress isn't inevitable, and at any point in time you can be unlucky. But it does seem like, for most points in history, you would rather be you, in your version of the present, than a randomly rolled person from any prior point of history leading up to your moment.

So most of the time, anyone playing this would feel more lucky to be themselves than any of the options they would have to roll for. Maybe if a version of this was offered to people 10,000 years from now they would say "crap, I rolled 2026".

Edit 2: I think the death hug might have got it.

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The_Blade 2 hours ago
on my 6th only the first roll counts roll, i got a boy born near Nairobi in 36,112 BCE that lived to 70

probably like 5% of humanity has his genes now. that was fun vibe coding

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retube 3 hours ago
I died within 2 days on my first roll. made it to 8 months on my second
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brabel 3 hours ago
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
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drhagen 53 minutes ago
Before clicking, I said to myself "Indian peasant".

> You have drawn a girl, born in the Ganges Plain in 1628 CE.

> She was born, married at 16, lost her mother at 19, was orphaned at 30, had 8 children, and died at 39 of pneumonic plague, with 6 surviving children.

Nailed it. Though in retrospect, I drew really well. It would have been safer to guess "toddler death".

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magneticnorth 35 minutes ago
My first random selection lived to age 68! I felt very lucky, and then that put my modern life into interesting perspective.
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aghilmort 12 minutes ago
damn, well done

og/goat demo of synthetic data gen

only nit is 'draw' button often below the fold

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nico 3 hours ago
It seems like the server might be overwhelmed

Very cool project

I was wondering if the generated people “fill up a spot” and temporarily change the stats for generating new lives. Eg, if the app already generated 10M stories, is it still using the same initial distribution for the new ones, or is generation conditioned on the stats of the already generated?

The random life I got: https://anyhumanever.com/life/1323665477-1682995380-16357802...

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spullara 3 hours ago
I think graph being log makes it a little hard to understand that the median birth year was around 2000 years ago. On the graph that is in the flat part but the flat part was a really, really long time.
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beardyw 3 hours ago
Hug of death I think.

Gave me a good and convincing first couple of tries. Good work.

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karim79 3 hours ago
Works but it's slow to load up.
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jimmyjazz14 2 hours ago
Really puts the marvels of modern life into perspective, most people did not live long or happy lives for much of human history.
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lbriner 3 hours ago
After having my first child (a girl who is now nearly 3 years old) these stats impact me so much more. My first roll was a girl in the Iraniam plateau in the 18 century who had a 33% chance of dying before they reached 5. She managed to live to 70 but experience so much death in her life.

I can't imagine my daughter dying before she reaches 5, it feels like it would be the worst feeling I could possibly imagine and then some.

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WillAdams 3 hours ago
Visit any older cemetery and look for the tiny headstones and the matching very brief lifespans, or read an older obituary for someone from your great-grandparent's generation or further back, or watch a couple of seasons of _Call the Midwife_.
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isoprophlex 33 minutes ago
Everyone keeps dying way too young :(
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grich7642 2 hours ago
"A girl was born in 1276 BCE, on the Deccan Plateau, near present-day Hyderabad... She lived on a labourer's wage"

Wage labor didn't exist yet and the cited source is for labor history between 1500CE and the present. The AI illustration also doesn't make any sense for the period.

This is the genuinely bad kind of slop because it's pretending to be semi-factual.

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chronolitus 2 hours ago
Oh nice! If you liked it, you might like:

yourlifeunderrome.com

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gfiorav 3 hours ago
Spot checked a life from 1990s in the Iberian peninsula and it cites the population at 72 million people. Off by quite a bit. Pretty cool regardless!
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anduril22 31 minutes ago
This is super cool
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mallory854 2 hours ago
This is awesome. I love seeing how humans have evolved into what we are today.
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garyrob 3 hours ago
I wrote a short story based on a similar scenario. (Caveat, I did it with AI help, but my ideas and many iterations and me doing final editing to get it the way I want).

https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/18/everyone-who-will-ever-b...

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Planktonne 3 hours ago
Without wishing to be unkind, this reads a lot more as 'one-shot with AI' than 'many iterations'; if you truly did that much editing, you didn't put it where it showed.

You've got all the AI favourite names and rhythms at once in the second paragraph, for example.

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garyrob 2 hours ago
Yeah, I think the AI probably shows. But in fact it is the result of many iterations.

But what I was trying to get across are the ideas, not the language. I think it you were to read the whole thing, you'd probably find it interesting. But if not, feel free to let me know.

But my hypothesis is that there are people with skills for ideas that have the potential to be interesting stories, but not necessarily great prose skills; I don't think those necessarily line up in the same person. Up until now, to write a worthwhile short story you had to be among the best at both.

Maybe AI can help change that, and maybe (I hypothesize), that would be for the better. I understand that such a hypothesis would be controversial, but to me, it feels worth exploring.

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richhwang 31 minutes ago
Love it!
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smarf 3 hours ago
an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
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BeetleB 3 hours ago
Leading cause of death: dysentry

Had to laugh.

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WarmWash 3 hours ago
Has anyone managed to roll a life later than ~600CE?
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magneticnorth 2 hours ago
Yes, but I definitely think the probabilities are off - the explanation, which I agree with, states "a random birth is far more likely to fall near the present."

But it appears to be drawing much more uniformly from the years than you'd expect given the probability curve (population curve) pictured.

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wat10000 2 hours ago
Bear in mind that the population curve defaults to a log scale on the year axis. If you switch it over to linear, that big fat area at the end shrinks to a needle-like spike..
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jameshart 38 minutes ago
Managed to roll a guy born in 1988 in the eastern US. He hasn’t married yet and he’s still alive.
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Insanity 2 hours ago
1980CE, Nile Valley, died at 68 from cardiovascular disease.
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beardyw 3 hours ago
You can chose.
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iJohnDoe 44 minutes ago
Most likely died of smallpox...

Great, let's bring back smallpox and measles because the US elected officials are too dumb or genuinely want to destroy the world.

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mallory854 2 hours ago
boy, born in the Guinea Coast in 211,966 BCE. Died from an accident at age 40.
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guybedo 3 hours ago
we are probably living inside a more advanced version of this game right now.

Somebody, somewhere, somewhen rolled the dice and here we are.

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2OEH8eoCRo0 3 hours ago
Very cool. Reads like a Dwarf Fortress history. For those that don't play, every creature in the game has a life story.
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IDidntMakeIt 3 hours ago
I died at age 2 of Typhoid Fever.

Modern take on Oregon Trail vibes I like it

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bpodgursky 2 hours ago
> You have drawn a girl, born in the Levant in 1042 CE.

> She was born, married at 18, had 4 children, lost her mother at 28, was orphaned at 41, was widowed at 70, and died at 71 of heart failure (degenerative illness), with 3 surviving children and 9 grandchildren.

First try. Honestly I'm going to call this a W under the circumstances.

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hnmuuatsno 2 hours ago
[dead]
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heyitsmedotjayb 30 minutes ago
It said my character was born in Palestine (which never existed and nobody ever was from), but it was actually the ancient land of Judea and Sameria. Please fix this disgustingly racist and antisemitic app.
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culi 26 minutes ago
Herodotus used the term Palaistine in his work The Histories in the 5th century BCE. The earliest written record of the word "Judea" is from extra-biblical writings from 733 BCE.

The most "official" designation was arguably when the Roman's designated Syria Palaestina in 135 CE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine

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