tinderbox210

(I decided to follow the "grey tattoos and white body paint" HC and sorry if the tattoos are random lol)

Author’s Note

Things have been a bit slow lately, so I decided to post the first in a series I’ve been working on. Please be patient with me for the follow ups as living with ADHD and Autism is a bitch when you’re trying to express your ideas. 

Perspective

Since watching all four films, I’ve had questions ricocheting around my mind about the state of the world beyond the west coast of the United States. 

For starters, I find it frustrating at times that humans as a whole in the Planet of the Apes world seem to be underestimated. The humans during the Caesar trilogy were scraping by and the humans in Kingdom are hiding underground but this is a small sampling of the human race as a whole. 

Apologies but California, despite its diverse population, does not represent the entire human species and our full capabilities to survive a pandemic.  

Humans as the modern species we currently are, are around 300,000 years old and our ancestors spent the majority of their time being hunter gatherers. However in the past 50,000 years since the majority of our ancestors left Africa, we rose to populate nearly every continent (except Antarctica) and that was all due to our adaptability. 

Humans evolved on the African plains in a climate that fluctuated every couple of generations. It made our ancestors evolve to be adaptable to rapid change.

Origin of Us Episode 3 - Brains, BBC Two Documentary. Aired - 31st Oct 2011

The first signs of stationary civilisations began to emerge independently around the world in the last 6000-10,000 years. And the beginning of our current modern era only began in the 1800s and for the past 200 years our technology began advancing with every decade that passed. Humans found new inventions to make everyday survival skills aka modern chores easier and quicker. While these were great achievements it made humans more dependent on them and decreased their chances of being able to survive on their own if society were to suddenly collapse beneath them. 

While some populations in the POTA universe may not have been adaptable enough in a post apocalyptic event that doesn’t mean other humans in the world had the same problem as not every country had the same dependency on technology and government services. 

To be clear, I love the storylines and I honestly don’t think it would work if all of a sudden any following movies were moved to a different continent unless one of the characters travels there. However, I think humans' ability to survive and thrive over and over again is being underestimated.

Speculated Death Toll

To start this series we’ll begin with the basics of the damage the Simian Flu did to humans within the first 10 years.

According to the Planet of the Apes wikia page of the Simian Flu Pandemic there is conflicting information on how much of the human population was killed. One says that 99% of the human population were killed (this I believe was sourced from the screen rant website (1)

(2)

Another says 50% due to the disease and the civil unrest that followed.

(2)

From the promotional video it’s stated that 1 in 10 humans survived, revealing that 90% of humans have died.

(2)

And finally from both the wiki and wikipedia page citing the ending video from the film Rise as a source, they’ve stated that 0.2% of humans are immune, meaning 99.8% of humans could be gone.

(2) & (3)

Based on real world statistics, the global human population by July 2016 was 7.5 billion people (7,558,554,526). (4)

Going by the percentage order above, if 99% of humans died from both disease and civil unrest, that’s 7.4 billion fatalities leaving only 75 million people left. Which was the estimated global human population between 1000 - 500 BC. (4)

If 50% of humans died, that’s 3.7 billion people gone and roughly 3.7 billion humans remaining. This was the human population of the world in 1971. (4)

Then if it was 90% of humans killed from the disease then famine and war. That’s 6.8 billion humans gone, leaving 755 million people left. That’s approximately the world population from between 1760 to 1804. (4)

For 99.8%, that would mean 15 million survivors with 7.47 billion fatalities. That places the human population roughly the same as it was in 2000-1000 BC. As mentioned above on the wikipedia page for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, showing that only 0.2% of humans are genetically immune. (4)

Unfortunately, these are conflicting statistics. I don’t know if anything official has come forward and confirmed which one was correct but I think it lends to the credibility of the collapse of modern human civilisation as there would be no intact organisation left to reliably collect this information and if there was any semblance of civilisation left then they would have have to estimate the global loss in isolation.

It's also possible that some humans that weren’t genetically immune managed to escape. There are still highly isolated parts of the world where the infection would be unlikely to reach. Some humans might have seen the pandemic getting worse without relief and other populations may have recent memories of being exposed to other diseases by outsiders so they would have had that recent life lesson still ingrained in their communal memory. So in theory they could have easily decided to disappear into the wilderness or into isolation until the disease had run its course and had no one left to carry it on. This was especially seen during our own recent plague of COVID-19. 

(In later posts in this series, I’ll be going a bit more in depth about this when I cover how I think different areas and people would have reacted.)

Global Ape Population

For chimps, there are around 3,400 captive worldwide and in the wild the estimated population of all sub types (Central, Eastern, Western and Nigeria-Cameroon) is 150,000 to 300,000. (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) & (10)

With Gorillas, combining all the wild sub-species including: Mountain, Western, Eastern lowland and Cross River populations in the wild would add up to approximately 321,300 and 343 gorillas in captivity worldwide. (11) (12) (13) (14) & (15)

Then there’s the orangutans which include the Bornean, Sumatran and the Tapanuli. Altogether there’s an estimate between 55,000 to 104,000 orangutans in the wild with around 200 in captivity in institutions around the world. (16) (17) & (18)

Bonobo’s are estimated to have a population between 10,000 and 50,000 in the wild, however it’s currently unknown how many bonobos there are in captivity worldwide but one can assume it’s less than both Gorillas, Chimps and Orangutans as they’re not a well known great ape. (19) (20) & (21)

Then for the sake of inclusivity of the lesser apes; gibbons and siamangs. There are 20 sub species of gibbon and altogether there are roughly 406,597 in the wild. Siamangs are estimated to be 22,390 in Sumatra. However, it’s unknown how many are in captivity worldwide. (22) (23)

Altogether, all apes worldwide at the start of the Simian Flu would add up to roughly 1.2 million apes, still far less than all the humans tens years after the pandemic started.

In comparison, even factoring civil conflicts and severe famines that followed the Simian flu pandemic, it would still leave the global human population outnumbering all the populations of apes around the world by a massive margin. 

Where Are We?

In this horrific case, the issue of overpopulation would work in humanity’s favour through the sheer scale of how many of us there are. There’s so many of us that even losing 99% of us wouldn’t even render us as a critically endangered species on the IUCN list.

The next most obvious question would be, where are all these people? This is where the vastness of our planet comes into play. It was calculated a few years ago that the then global human population of 7.5 billion when standing shoulder to shoulder could fit in an area of 500 square miles which is roughly the same size as Los Angeles (ironically this is close to where Eagle Clan is set in Kingdom). (24)

This is Los Angeles.

Here it is shown on a California map.

Here is LA compared to the continental USA.

And finally, the world (side note - Greenland, Africa and Canada are out of scale but it proves the point).

(25)

If the entire world population can fit in that one small space before the Simian flu, it stands to reason that the breakdown of modern travel and communication would make tracking down or encountering the remaining human survivors very difficult even if there were 50% of humans left let alone 0.2%.

End of Part 1

Sources

https://screenrant.com/planet-of-the-apes-simian-flu-origin-explained/. (1)

https://planetoftheapes.fandom.com/wiki/Simian_Flu_Pandemic#Speculation (2)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_of_the_Planet_of_the_Apes (3)

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ (4)

https://www.ifaw.org/animals/chimpanzees#:~:text=What%20do%20chimpanzees%20eat?,much%20does%20a%20chimpanzee%20weigh? (5)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159116301411#:~:text=As%20the%20opportunity%20to%20breed,rearing%20young%20may%20impact%20welfare. (6)

https://projectchimps.org/chimps/chimps-facts/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Project%20ChimpCare,disappears%20when%20they%20reach%20adolescence. (7)

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/great_apes/chimpanzees (8)

https://www.ifaw.org/animals/chimpanzees (9)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/chimpanzee (10)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/mountain-gorilla (11)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla#:~:text=There%20are%20thought%20to%20be,which%20is%20classified%20as%20Endangered. (12)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/gorilla#:~:text=Males%20mature%20at%20an%20even,to%20Endangered%20in%20November%202018. (13)

https://wwf.panda.org/discover/knowledge_hub/endangered_species/great_apes/gorillas#:~:text=Population%20&%20distribution,split%20into%20two%20separate%20groups. (14)

https://www.koko.org/conservation/status-of-gorillas-worldwide/#:~:text=Cross%2DRiver%20gorillas%20live%20on,subspecies%20from%20a%20sustainability%20perspective. (15)

https://orangutan.com/how-many-orangutans-are-left/#:~:text=There%20are%20three%20species%20of,place%20with%20around%2015%2C000%20individuals. (16)

https://ielc.libguides.com/sdzg/factsheets/orangutans/population#:~:text=Not%20precisely%20known%20(IUCN),2004) (17)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endangerment_of_orangutans#:~:text=Billboard%20magazine%2C%201917-,Decline%20of%20population,being%20held%20in%20conservation%20sites. (18)

https://www.worldwildlife.org/species/bonobo (19)

https://twycrosszoo.org/explore/animals/bonobo/#:~:text=Twycross%20Zoo%20is%20the%20only,ape%20species%20with%20this%20hierarchy. (20)

https://www.bonobo.org/threats (21)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbon (22)

https://animalia.bio/siamang-gibbon#:~:text=Population%20number,to%20be%20around%2022%2C390%20individuals. (23)

Google search '7 billion fit in one city', then select the National Geographic website labelled 'Quiz: Population 7 Billion—Could We All Fit in One City?' (24) - wouldn't let me post with this link attached or even typed.

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

Release Date: May 26, 2006 Director: Brett Ratner

#me core