5 Near-Extinction Events Humanity Barely Survived

We almost didn’t make it.

Not melodramatically, film-trailer.

At certain times in the history of humanity, the species we now inhabit was narrowed down to such a small number that even the fact of survival was questioned. When that thread that binds humanity was so fine that one bad season, one unlucky year, would have broken it completely.

We tend to believe that we are the superior species. Resilient. Unstoppable. And in many ways, we are.

Yet the world apparently did not receive that message.

Today, here in this post i am going to talk about five occasions that humankind came close to extinction and got away with it.

1. The Toba Super Volcano

I don’t know if you are familiar with this event, but this happened approximately 74,000 years ago.

Today, this volcano is present in Sumatra, Indonesia. This volcano did something that had not been done in the course of 2.5 million years of the history of the planet Earth.

Of course. It exploded.

Not as we will commonly conceive of volcanic eruptions. Not Mount St. Helens. Not even Vesuvius.

Toba shot about 2,800 cubic kilometers of ash and rock to the air.

In 1980, the volcano Mount St. Helens, that caused the deaths of 57 people and made world news, dispersed approximately 1 cubic kilometer of material.

Toba was nearly 3,000 times larger.

The ash cloud dispersed in South Asia and was so thick that there are still layers of the ash in India, which were deposited in just a few days.

The debris that was thrown into the stratosphere blackened the sun. The world temperature decreased between 3–15 degrees Celsius. The planet grew darker over the years.

The scientists refer to it as a volcanic winter. It sounds almost peaceful. It wasn’t.

The prevailing theory had it that Toba basically broke humanity decades ago. Genetic research came in, and the results were appalling. Our genome demonstrates a population bottleneck, a drastic and abrupt constriction of human genetic variety, just at this time.

All current human beings trace their lineage to an apparent tiny set of ancestral beings. It was estimated that the world’s human population had reduced to between 1,000 and 10,000 people. Perhaps not more than 40 breeding pairs.

Think about that. 40 couples. That is not even as big as other apartment buildings.

Here is where the narration gets complex, however, and more exciting, to tell the truth.

The recent archaeological findings in India and Africa indicate that man continued to survive till the time of the eruption without the complete decay the theory had envisaged. The tools of stone above and below beds of Toba ash are distinctly similar. That is, whoever was using them prior to the eruption is the same after the eruption, doing the same kind of things, perhaps the same stories by the same fires.

So maybe Toba didn’t break us. Perhaps it was disastrous in certain areas, bearable elsewhere.

The genetic bottleneck could have been caused by a combination of a series of pressures, climate change, the Out of Africa migration, and perhaps Toba, narrowing down to tens of thousands of years.

This is what appears to be obvious: something about that period of time, almost wiped us out. The scar remains in our DNA to this day.

We survived. But it was near enough to make its mark, which 74,000 years have never quite washed out.

2. The Black Death

It is well known that most of us have heard about this at least once in life.

The ships of the Crimean port of Kaffa landed in Sicily in 1346.

They carried rats. The rats carried fleas. And the fleas brought Yersinia pestis (a bacterium so apt at killing people that it remains, even by sheer numbers, the most deadly pandemic in history to have occurred)

This was followed by the Black Death.

The figures are too many to think. The plague claimed a number of an estimated 75 to 200 million people between 1346 and 1353.

Modern Europe lost a figure ranging between 30 and 60 percent of its whole population.

Some cities lost more. Hamburg. Bremen. London. Florence had lost 120,000 to 50,000 people in a few years.

Whole villages were left unoccupied. Not evacuated, but abandoned. Human beings simply ceased to exist.

The disease in itself was unkind, clinically effective. Bubonic plague resulted in the formation of lymph nodes which were swollen and blackened, violent fevers, and internal bleeding. On days 3 to 5 after the symptoms were experienced, 80 percent of the victims had died.

The pneumonic form, or the one that was transmitted by coughing only, killed in less than 24 hours after the initial symptoms.

It happened to some people that they went to bed healthy and were killed before they got up.

Shortages of labor led to economic meltdown. Religion deteriorated, with individuals grappling with the modes of knowing why God had seemingly forsaken them.

According to some historians, had mortality been a bit higher, or even the plague itself had lasted even a few more years, recovery could have been impossible at all.

The mechanisms needed to reconstruct agriculture, government, and mere organization required sufficient numbers of living men to operate. Europe almost dropped to that level.

And the plague continued to return.

The next four centuries were followed by catastrophes every 10 to 20 years after the first catastrophe.

Another set of killings was the Great Plague of London in 1665, which claimed 100,000 people.

It was not until the 18th century that Europe was completely out of the shadow of plague.

The recent work on genetics linked the origin of the Black Death to Central Asia (possibly the area around Lake Issyk-Kul), in which tombstones dating to 1338 and 1339 state that the cause of death was pestilence.

Thence, by trade routes, unseen, unarrested, it swept off till it had reached nearly every part that men inhabit.

We survived.

But the world bequeathed by it was hardly like the one before it.

3. The 1918 Spanish Flu

In March 1918, a soldier who was in Fort Riley, Kansas, walked into the infirmary complaining of a fever, sore throat, and headache.

In a few hours, dozens of troops exhibited the symptoms. And in a few days, hundreds of people were hospitalized.

The virus they carried would proceed to infect the earth (one third of the entire human population), with about 50–100 million people perishing as a result. More than twice the number of men were killed in World War I, done in two years as compared to four.

The 1918 flu was so frightening not only because of the speed at which it was spreading. It was who it killed.

The majority of strains of flu are fatal, mostly to people with weaker immune systems, that is, very young and the very old.

But this was different.

The 1918 flu claimed the lives of healthy individuals. Between the ages of 20 and 40 years. Adults who are in their youth are the most immune resistant.

Now, scientists think that this was the problem.

The virus caused the so-called cytokine storm, the excessive reaction of the immune system so intense that the body practically attacked its own lungs due to combating the infection. The greater the immune system, the more disastrous the reaction.

Patients would get common flu symptoms (fever, fatigue, and aches). Then, in a few hours, they would fall into bad condition. Their lungs filled with hydraulic. They turned blue or purple due to the lack of oxygen on the skin, physicians referred to it as heliotrope cyanosis. Individuals who had been perfectly healthy during breakfast, died by nightfall.

The pandemic came in three waves.

In spring of 1918, the initial one was fairly mild and did not create significant concerns.

The second wave was in fall 1918, and it was catastrophic, that is when most of the deaths were recorded.

In early 1919, a third wave came by.

There was a death of 675,000 in the U.S. The Second World War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War added up to a total of more than all American combat deaths in the First World War. In one year, the life expectancy in the U.S. had declined by 12 years.

In Western Samoa, a quarter of the total population succumbed to death after two months. Certain indigenous people living in Alaska were exterminated.

And the time of it all came out wrong.

In the end of September, 1918, the city of Philadelphia made the decision to conduct a huge public parade to sell war bonds. 200,000 of people crowded onto the streets.

In 72 hours, all the hospital beds in the city were occupied. Thousands of people died within the course of a week.

The 1918 flu claimed the lives of more individuals within 24 months than the Black Death claimed those people within four years. Then it, nearly as mysteriously as it had seemed, became less fatal as a seasonal strain. By 1920, it was gone.

But it abandoned 100 million graves.

5. The Younger Dryas

12,900–11,700 Years Ago

Things were on the rise about 13,000 years ago.

The last Ice Age was ending. Temperatures were rising. Mankind was extending to other continents, inventing the earliest agriculture, and constructing the first permanent cities. The planet was becoming warmer after tens of thousands of years of vicious cold.

And in what might have been less than a decade, it ceased.

Temperatures did not simply level off. They plummeted. The ice cores in Greenland indicate a cooling of 15 degrees Celsius within a short period of less than a human lifetime. The world averages dropped by 2–6 degrees. The glaciers that had been on retreat started gaining momentum.

This was the Younger Dryas, or 1,200 years.

Suppose you get up one morning and the world is cold and hostile and strange, and it remains so for 1,200 years.

The melting was likely the cause of the latter. When giant glaciers melted, they dumped vast amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic, cold and light water that interfered with the ocean circulation patterns upon which global climate depends. Basically, the warming occasioned self-interruption.

The human impacts were deplorable. Archaeological data demonstrate massive population degradation. The big animals upon which the hunter-gatherer groups relied, woolly mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, etc., became extinct, most likely due to the confluence of climate stress and direct human hunting.

Early agricultural settlements of the Fertile Crescent failed, and some were completely abandoned.

Populations previously growing went down drastically. The struggle to survive was not certain or safe for over a millennium.

But here’s the strange part.

It is possible that the Younger Dryas caused human civilization to gain speed.

Having to survive food scarcities and climate disorder, humans did not only survived but also created new things.

The crisis made the early populations drift towards agriculture: the intentional diversification of plants, the rearing of animals, food hoarding between seasons.

By 11,700 years ago, when the Younger Dryas first came to an end, humans were at the edge of the Neolithic revolution, the invention of farming, urban centers, and structured civilization.

We nearly froze. And in attempting to survive, we somehow created the basis of all that followed.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/toba-volcano-catastrophe-theory-human-evolution

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c

https://www.history.com/articles/toba-supervolcano-human-survival

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04800-3

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/black-death-greatest-catastrophe-ever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21777-spanish-flu

https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/flu-pandemic-1918

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7528857/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6477554/

Previously Published on medium