History, let's face it, is a collection of stories. We walk around with a grab bag of anecdotes in our heads: Abraham Lincoln kept his papers in his top hat, Henry VIII's leg smelled terrible, Vikings didn't actually have horns on their helmets, and so on. For many of us, this set of stories is part factoid, part anecdote, and part moral arc.

But as a depiction of reality, it's a statistician's nightmare. The stories that we call history are a deeply biased sample, selected for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with fairly representing our collective past. We know far more about the sequence of Frankish kings than we do about a typical peasant's routine in 5th century Avignon. Think of your notion of history, and contrast it to the fact that most lives ever lived were Asian, poor, and brief. You knew that thing about the Vikings' helmets, but how much could you say about the unrecorded 99% of past humanity?

So: what would happen if stories were drawn from actual data, randomized to give a valid representation of the human story? That's the question that was stuck in my head, and that drove this project forward. If you could draw a life at random from all of human history, what would it look like? Roll the dice, and see a genuinely random life, depicted as well as the data allow. Do it again and again, and what kind of pointillist painting emerges from all those colorful drops of humanity?

That's the idea of anyhumanever. Over 100 billion humans, each with a story. We are at the freaky tail-end of a brutal human history; our lives are statistically anomalous in every way imaginable. Rukeyser also wrote: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Well, let's not go that far. But if we can internalize the statistical strangeness of our current selves, at least the present will gain some of the credit it surely deserves.