Who was the first person to claim that more people are alive than have ever lived?

Question

I have seen some claims that fear mongering environmentalists made this statement to shock people about the global population, but I've also seen some references to Biblical literalists who believe the world is only a few thousand years old. Does anyone have a good reference for the source of this assertion? Wikipedia has a discussion of the underlying question that is interesting if you want to know about whether the dead outnumber the living http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population. My only concern is an attribution to the claim that the living outnumber the dead.

Answer 1

1. It seems be a "now forgotten writer" who, in the early 1970s, estimated that 75% of the people who had ever been born were alive at that time. This had no substance to it, but versions of the claim lingered on, and became an urban myth. The current version, that more than half the people who have ever lived, are alive today, circulates extensively on the internet. As such, there will be no known population theorist to whom this assertion can be attributed.

2. Here are various webpages which dismiss the idea.
http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzalivetoday.htm
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Ecology/The%20Number%20of%20People%20That%20Have%20Ever%20Lived.htm
http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=7421
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/basic_information/how_many_ever.html
http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/may2000/957452021.Ev.r.html