The Worst Time in History to Be Born as a Human

This is you. There's your dad, his dad, and his. Keep going.

Soon you'll fly past powdered wigs, chain mail, mammoths, and eventually stumble upon a guy squatting in the dirt, chewing on a beetle, and trying not to die before sundown. That guy, that's your ancestor. He has no name, no shoes, and no idea that you, a distant descendant with a snack addiction and a mild caffeine dependency, even exist.

But here's the thing. If that guy or anyone of the thousands of people in your ancestral chain had tripped at the wrong moment, oh, I wonder what killed, gotten eaten by something toothy. Hell no.

Or just failed to reproduce. you wouldn't be here. You exist because a thousand people before you didn't die when they should have.

You're not lucky. You're the byproduct of violent coincidence and stubborn biology, daddy. So, let's take a look at how close you came over and over again to never being born at all.

We're going to rank five of the deadliest periods in human history. From bad but survivable to you might as well start writing your will at birth. Let's get right into it.

Number five, ice age. Around 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial maximum, Earth wasn't exactly cozy. Massive ice sheets up to 2 miles thick smothered huge chunks of North America, Europe, and Asia.

Average global temperatures dropped by about 10° F, 6° C, turning most of the planet into a frozen wasteland, where food was a distant rumor. Me hungry. If you were alive back then, your daily routine involved not dying of hypothermia, hunting woolly mammoths the size of school buses, and occasionally running away from creatures like the cave lion, Pantherra Spalaya, one of the largest wild cats in history.

Your house, probably a mammoth bone hut, or a cave shared with 40 of your least favorite relatives. Your clothing, animal hide stitched together with bone needles. Want dinner?

Good luck. You're armed with a sharpened stick and your target weighs six tons and is actively trying to kill you. And if starvation didn't get you, a simple infected cut probably would.

There were no antibiotics, no vaccines, and no emergency rooms, just a lot of home remedies involving chewing random plants and hoping for the best. Despite all this, Homo sapiens adapted, inventing tools, mastering fire, and even creating early art like the cave paintings at Lasco. Number four, the dawn of agriculture.

Somewhere around 10,000 years ago, humans had a brilliant idea. Bro, what's wrong, bro? I can't chase one more mammoth.

My legs hurt. Bro, you don't even have legs. Come on, man.

We're only 400 miles away from breakfast. Hear me out. We make food come to us.

How? We stay in one place, grow stuff, build. I don't know.

Okay. Welcome to the dawn of agriculture. Also known as the moment when humanity accidentally made life way harder.

Early farmers swapped the nomadic hunting lifestyle for settling down in permanent villages, planting crops like wheat, barley, and lentils. Sounds smart, right? Well, it was, except for the part where it unleashed a buffet of new problems.

Living close together meant diseases could now spread like wildfire. Your diet way worse, less protein, more vitamin deficiencies, and your teeth basically rotted out of your face. And don't even get me started on crop failure.

One bad drought, one swarm of locusts, one random flood, and your entire village starved to death while glaring at the sky. Archaeologists have even found ancient skeletons showing signs of malnutrition, anemia, and horrifying dental disasters. Number three, the Mongol invasions.

If you were alive in the 13th century and saw a cloud of dust on the horizon, you had about 3 minutes to panic before your city got turned into a parking lot. Led by Genghask Khan, a man who treated mercy like a myth, the Mongols carved out the largest land empire in human history, stretching from China to Eastern Europe. Their strategy: Show up fast, hit hard, and leave absolutely nothing standing.

Entire cities were wiped off the map. population slaughtered and survivors, if there were any, were sometimes used as human shields for the next battle. Mongol horse archers could hit you from 300 yards away while riding at full gallop, basically inventing mobile warfare centuries before tanks were even a thing.

Historians estimate the Mongol invasions killed around 10% of the world's population at a time when the world population was already tiny. Number two, the Black Death. In 1347, Europe got an unexpected package from Central Asia, courtesy of some highly motivated fleas, and things went downhill fast.

The Black Death, or bubonic plague, tore through towns and cities like a biological wildfire caused by the bacterium urinia pestus. It traveled on rats, fleas, and humans who had absolutely no concept of personal hygiene. Once it hit, survival became a lottery.

You could catch it from a handshake, a shared cup, or just by breathing the same medieval air as an infected guy. Symptoms included giant swollen lymph nodes, fever, vomiting blood, and spoiler alert, death, usually within days. It's estimated that somewhere between 30% to 60% of Europe's population was wiped out in just a few years.

Entire villages were abandoned, economies collapsed, and doctors walked around wearing creepy bird masks filled with flowers because apparently vibe checking the plague was peak medieval science. Number one, the Toba super volcano eruption. Around 74,000 years ago, the Toba super volcano exploded and nearly deleted humanity from existence.

When Toba erupted, it launched over 670 cubic miles of ash and debris into the sky. enough material to cover the entire United States. The eruption triggered a volcanic winter so devastating that sunlight was blocked for an estimated 6 to 10 years.

Global temperatures crashed by up to 27° F, 15° C. Plants withered, animals starved, and ecosystems collapsed worldwide. For early humans, already struggling just to find enough calories not to die every day, it was catastrophic.

Food supplies vanished. Entire landscapes turned to frozen deserts. Rivers dried up.

Forests became graveyards. It's estimated that the total human population shrank to fewer than 3,000 individuals. A genetic bottleneck so tight that every person alive today likely descends from that tiny handful of survivors.

No crops, no animals, no sunlight, no second chances. Imagine spending your entire life in darkness, freezing, starving, with the constant fear that today might simply be the last day anyone sees the sun. And yet somehow, against all odds, a few stubborn, desperate humans managed to endure.

You exist because they didn't give up when everything else did. Thanks for watching Barely Evolved. And remember, you are the miracle your ancestors fought mammoths for.