When Was The Worst Time In History To Die?

By combining historical demography and epidemiology, we can (sort of) determine how people throughout history have died.

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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Comorbidity: the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient.
- Schistosomiasis: a disease caused by liver flukes that has affected humans for more than 100,000 years.
- Meta-analysis: an examination of data from a number of independent studies of the same subject, in order to determine overall trends.
- Prehistory: the period between when modern humans first appeared and the dawn of agriculture.
- Columbian exchange: the process by which plants, animals, diseases, people, and ideas were introduced from Europe, Asia, and Africa to North and South America and vice versa.
- Zoonosis: a disease which can be transmitted to humans from animals.

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CREDITS
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David Goldenberg | Script Writer & Narrator
Lizah van der Aart | Illustration
Arcadi Garcia i Rius | Illustration
Ever Salazar | Video Editor & Director
Nathaniel Schroeder | Music

MinuteEarth is produced by Neptune Studios LLC

OUR STAFF
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Lizah van der Aart • Sarah Berman • Cameron Duke
Arcadi Garcia i Rius • David Goldenberg • Melissa Hayes
Alex Reich • Henry Reich • Peter Reich
Ever Salazar • Leonardo Souza • Kate Yoshida

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REFERENCES
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[Munchkin.Of.Pern]

It’s reassuring to know that the top cause of human deaths actually isn’t humans. I knew it was up there, but… it isn’t the number one culprit. That’s really reassuring.

[thelastcube.]

i knew that there were a lot of humans in the past, but never realized that the combined number was beyond 100B

[AndyHappyGuy]

It’s hard to imagine all these 110 billion people were real people, who had their own lives and experiences. No matter how long ago they lived, or how short their lives were, they were still real, conscious beings who were here one day and not just some silly statistics.

[royrequireswifi]

Wow. I knew malaria and violence would be in the three bug killers. But childbirth was really surprising! Not exactly a very common fact like the others.

[KuruGDI]

"60 billion-ish", "30 billion or so" - What a way to quantify dead people 😅

[corwin]

I’m going to hypothesize that the number of people killed by death rays from Mars has remained consistent throughout most of human history

[jellovendigar]

1:49 feel sorry for the guy who died from a rat humping his head

[bevanfindlay]

Encouragingly though, when I was first looking at malaria statistics (and when I got it myself) roughly two decades ago, the number of deaths per year were above a million annually. We've made massive progress to halve the effects of such a nasty killer in only a short time (down from much higher numbers prior).

Also, speaking from experience, malaria is not fun. Yay for modern medicine!

[beyondcatastrophe_]

It would be interesting to see this related to the numbers for old age, since that seems a pretty common cause as well

[mrmimeisfunny]

Wouldn't "Died of Malaria" count as "Died from infection or parasite"?

[shinobix]

Anytime some guy is getting cocky and claiming that getting kicked in the balls is way worse than giving birth, just remind him that childbirth is the second biggest cause of death in all of history

[StarkRG]

Is it just me or did the video not actually answer the question "When Was The Worst Time In History To Die?" Sure, it dealt with what was the single most deadly thing throughout history. It mentioned (in a roundabout way) that we're currently living in the best time (since old age diseases are becoming among the highest killers). However it didn't say when the highest rate of non-age-related deaths were. Or when the rate of particularly nasty, painful ways to die was the highest. Though I guess that would require more in-depth discussion about what kinds of ways those would be and how to categorize them.

[karsten]

The worst time to die must be in times of great prosperity, because that's when you lose the most to live for by dying. dying early during times of disasters spares you the years of living through it.

[DangerRanger]

Am I the only one surprised that starvation isn't on the list at all?

[rhonemeyer]

Dang I love these videos! Really cool facts and additional knowledge I learn along the way

[beretperson]

It was kind of spooky how I made a joke about how if I tried to live in the woods I wouldn't last two days before dying from Malaria, and then instantly saw this had just been uploaded ("6 minutes ago"), and instantly knew that the punchline was going to be malaria.

[BeeBwakka]

The fact that there are more humans alive right now than have ever died from violence is very pleasantly surprising

[blahblahblah]

1:19 i heard ‘mass starvation' as mast*rb*tion 💀💀💀

[cerosis]

I wasn't expecting the #1 killer to be what it was

[God_Yeeter]

I’d rather get annihilated by a Gamma ray burst but that’s kinda rare