Watch How the World's Population Has Grown Over the Years

It took a long time to get going. But once we did, damn, we kind of got out of control didn’t we?

It took us 200,000 years to reach our first billion humans but only 200 years to hit seven billion. Watch as this map tracks how the world’s population grew and shows how we spread across the globe and highlights the empires and historic events that have helped us take over Earth like a pandemic.

[American Museum of Natural History via Digg]