Humanity has survived some absolutely brutal historical disasters - from freezing Ice Ages to volcanic winters, plagues, invasions, and total societal collapse. In this video, we rank 5 of the deadliest periods in human history, breaking down the survival chances of the average human...and how close you came to never being born at all.
00:00 Intro 01:28 Ice Age 02:56 Dawn of Agriculture 04:24 The Mongol Invasions 05:23 The Black Death 06:27 The Toba Supervolcano Eruption
00:01Then there's your dad, his dad, and the long, unbroken chain of people before them.
00:07Keep scrolling back through time, and the timeline gets ridiculous fast.
00:12You blow past powdered wigs, heavy suits of armor, flocks of mammoths,
00:16and eventually you'll land on some barefoot guy squatting in the dirt,
00:19chewing on a beetle, and praying he makes it to sundown.
00:23That scrappy survivor. He's your ancestor.
00:26No name, no shoes.
00:27No idea that one day his descendants would invent energy drinks, Wi-Fi, and TikTok dances.
00:33But here's the thing.
00:34If that man, or literally anyone in your family tree, had tripped at the wrong moment,
00:39gotten eaten by something with teeth, or just failed to reproduce, boom,
00:44end of the line.
00:45You wouldn't even exist.
00:47So when you think about it, you're not just lucky.
00:50You're the improbable outcome of violent coincidence and stubborn biology.
00:54You re-hear because a thousand generations of people before you survived things they absolutely
01:00should not have.
01:02And tonight, we're going to look at just how close humanity came over, and over again,
01:07to never making it.
01:08No, these are the five deadliest times in human history.
01:13Ranked from bad but manageable to you,
01:15might as well start writing your will the day you reborn.
01:17Number five.
01:20The ice age lets rewind 20,000 years.
01:23Earth is locked in what scientists call the last glacial maximum.
01:27Translation?
01:28The planet went full deep freeze.
01:31Massive ice sheets, two miles thick, covered half of North America, Europe, and Asia.
01:37Global temperatures dropped around 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
01:39If you lived then, your entire existence was about survival.
01:44Don't freeze to death.
01:46Hunt giant mammoths with nothing but sharpened sticks.
01:49And if that wasn't stressful enough,
01:51predators like the cave lion, one of the biggest wildcats ever,
01:54were roaming around and very much interested in making you dinner.
01:58Your house?
02:00Probably a cave packed with your least favorite cousins,
02:03or a hut made of mammoth bones.
02:05Your clothes?
02:07Animal skin stitched with bone needles?
02:09Your healthcare system?
02:10Chew some random plants and hope the infection doesn't kill you?
02:14And yet, against all odds, humans adapted.
02:17They invented tools, controlled fire,
02:19and even made art the breathtaking cave paintings of Lascaux,
02:23drawn in the middle of this frozen nightmare.
02:25Number four.
02:26The dawn of agriculture.
02:28Fast forward to about 10,000 years ago.
02:31Humans had a brilliant idea war, so they thought.
02:33Instead of chasing mammoths across endless miles,
02:37what if we made food come to us?
02:38Farming was born.
02:40At first it seemed like genius.
02:41Stay in one place.
02:43Grow wheat and barley.
02:44Build homes.
02:45Simple.
02:46Right?
02:47Except farming introduced a buffet of brand new problems.
02:51Living close together meant diseases spread like wildfire.
02:55Diets got worse.
02:56Less protein, fewer nutrients, and way more cavities.
02:59Skeletons from this era show anemia, malnutrition, and teeth so bad they'd make a dentist cry.
03:06And let's talk about crop failure.
03:09One swarm of locusts.
03:11One flood.
03:12Suddenly, your entire village is starving and glaring at the sky, wondering why the gods hate you.
03:18Agriculture gave us civilization, but it also made life harder in ways our nomadic ancestors never had to deal with.
03:24Number three, the Mongol invasions.
03:28Now let's jump to the 13th century.
03:30Picture this.
03:31You reliving your life in a medieval city when you notice a strange dust cloud on the horizon.
03:37Bad news, you've got maybe three minutes before your world ends.
03:41The Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, swept across Eurasia like an unstoppable storm.
03:46They created the largest land empire in history, stretching from China to Eastern Europe by showing up fast, hitting hard, and leaving nothing standing.
03:57Whole cities were erased.
03:59Populations slaughtered.
04:01Survivors, sometimes used as human shields for the next battle.
04:05Mongol horse archers were so skilled they could hit targets from hundreds of yards away while riding at full speed.
04:11It was mobile warfare centuries before tanks were even imagined.
04:14Historians estimate their campaigns killed around 10% of the world's population at the time.
04:1910% of everyone alive.
04:21Gone.
04:21That's not war.
04:22That's apocalypse with horses.
04:25Number two, the Black Death now let's skip to 1347.
04:29Europe receives an unexpected delivery from Central Asia, carried by fleas on rats.
04:34And with it came the Black Death.
04:36This plague tore through towns and cities like wildfire, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
04:42It spread on rats, fleas, and humans who had zero clue about hygiene.
04:47You could catch it from a handshake, from sharing a cup, or just by breathing the same medieval air as someone infected.
04:53Symptoms, fever, vomiting, blood, and swollen lymph nodes the size of apples.
04:58Most people died within days.
05:01The death toll.
05:02Toll low somewhere between 30% and 60% of Europe's entire population in just a few years.
05:09Entire villages were abandoned.
05:11Economies collapsed.
05:12And doctors walked around wearing those creepy bird beak masks stuffed with flowers, convinced it would protect them.
05:19Spoiler, it didn't.
05:20Number one, the Toba Supervolcano.
05:23But the deadliest event in all of human history happened long before any empire or plague.
05:29Around 74,000 years ago, the Toba Supervolcano in Indonesia erupted and nearly deleted humanity from the planet.
05:37When Toba blew, it launched more than 600 cubic miles of ash into the sky.
05:43Sunlight was blocked for up to a decade.
05:45Temperatures crashed by as much as 27 degrees Fahrenheit.
05:50Plants withered.
05:51Animals starved.
05:53Entire ecosystems collapsed.
05:56For humans already living hand-tombed out, this was catastrophic.
06:01Food supplies vanished.
06:02Rivers dried up.
06:04Forests turned to wastelands.
06:06Genetic evidence suggests the global human population may have shrunk to fewer than 3,000 people.
06:11That's it.
06:123,000.
06:13Smaller than a high school.
06:15Every single person alive today descends from that tiny, desperate group who somehow held on in the darkness.
06:22If they had failed, that would have been it.
06:23No civilizations.
06:24No history.
06:25No us.
06:26So here's the takeaway.
06:28You exist because your ancestors survived an ice age.
06:32Famines, plagues, wars, and even a supervolcano.
06:35Every moment of your life is borrowed from their struggle.
06:39You are the miracle that crawled out of catastrophe.
06:41So the least you can do.
06:43Hit subscribe.
06:43And now, young grasshopper, you have passed level 1 of the Survival Guide to Existing.
06:49What comes next?
06:51Well, how about this video over here?
06:54All about what happens when civilization itself collapses.
06:58Click here if you want to find out why the great Roman Empire fell apart.
07:02Or click here to learn what really caused the Berlin Wall to come down.
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