Full transcript
0:00Picture yourself 100,000 years ago,
0:02standing in a world full of monsters.
0:03Cave lions the size of a car, bears that
0:06stand taller than a basketball hoop.
0:07Every one of them stronger, faster, and
0:09better armed than you. Now, look around.
0:11They're all extinct, and you're still
0:12here. The weakest animal in that entire
0:14world became the most terrifying thing
0:16that has ever lived. And by the end of
0:17this, you'll understand why a zebra
0:19today is more afraid of the sound of
0:20your voice than of a lion. Before I show
0:22you how a creature this weak took over
0:24the planet, look at something stranger.
0:25Because the first clue to how terrifying
0:27we are isn't in how we hunt. It's in the
0:29things we leave behind. Dig into the
0:31ground almost anywhere, in almost any
0:32century, and you find things no other
0:34animal on Earth would ever make. In
0:36northern Italy, in a place called
0:37Povegliano Veronese, archaeologists
0:39opened a grave from around 1,400 years
0:42ago and found a man missing his right
0:44hand. It had been cut off clean at the
0:45forearm, probably with a single blow.
0:47And then he did something no other
0:49creature would ever think of. He
0:50strapped an iron knife to the stump,
0:51tied it on with a buckle and leather,
0:53and lived with it for years. We know he
0:55used it constantly, because he tightened
0:57those straps by gripping them in his
0:58teeth over and over every day for years,
1:00until the teeth on one side of his mouth
1:02were ground down to almost nothing. This
1:04is a man who lost his hand and replaced
1:05it with a blade. But that man at least
1:07had a reason. The next thing we dig up
1:09has none. 9,000 years ago, in the city
1:11of Jericho, people took the skulls of
1:13their own dead, packed them in wet
1:15plaster, and pressed seashells into the
1:17eye sockets to make them look alive
1:18again. Then they painted them and kept
1:20them inside the house, under the floor
1:21where the family slept, close enough to
1:23look at every single day. And it gets
1:25stranger. On a Scottish island called
1:27South Uist, archaeologists found two
1:29bodies buried under the floor of a house
1:313,000 years old. They looked ordinary at
1:33first, but when the bones were tested,
1:35nothing matched. One skeleton had the
1:37skull of one person, the jaw of another,
1:39and an arm and a leg from two more
1:41people entirely. It wasn't a single body
1:43at all. It was several different people
1:45taken apart and rebuilt into one, then
1:47soaked in a bog to preserve the flesh
1:48and kept above ground for years before
1:50anyone buried it. And some of those
1:52parts came from people who had died
1:53centuries apart, which means someone
1:55held onto to pieces for generations,
1:57waiting before they built the final
1:59body. These people didn't just keep
2:00their dead. They took them apart and
2:02made new ones. But keeping the dead and
2:04rebuilding them still comes from
2:05something like love. The last one
2:06doesn't. In Kenya, in a region called
2:08Turkana, scientists dug up a single shin
2:10bone. It is 1.45 million years old. And
2:13a researcher named Briana Pobiner found
2:15nine cut marks on it, made with a stone
2:17tool, sitting exactly where you would
2:19slice to strip the muscle from the bone.
2:21It's the oldest clear evidence we have
2:23that one of our own relatives butchered
2:24another for its meat. And this was more
2:26than a million years before modern
2:27humans even existed. No other animal
2:29buries its dead or paints them or cuts
2:31its own kind apart with tools. We've
2:33been doing strange, deliberate,
2:35unsettling things since long before we
2:37were even us. But being strange isn't
2:39the same as being terrifying. To
2:40understand why the entire animal kingdom
2:42is afraid of us, you have to go back to
2:44the one thing this soft little creature
2:46could always do better than anything
2:47alive. Picture a man on that open
2:49grassland in the heat of the day,
2:51watching an antelope graze a few hundred
2:53meters off. He has no bow and no trap.
2:55Just a sharpened stick and a body that
2:56would lose a straight fight to almost
2:58everything out here. So he doesn't fight
2:59it. He just starts walking toward it.
3:01The antelope bolts instantly, explodes
3:03across the plain at a speed the man
3:04could never touch. And in seconds, it's
3:06a dot on the horizon. But the man
3:08doesn't chase, and he doesn't speed up.
3:10He just keeps walking in the same
3:11direction at the same steady pace. He
3:13finds it again an hour later, resting in
3:15the shade. It bolts again. He keeps
3:16coming. Here's what the antelope's body
3:18can't understand. Every sprint builds up
3:20heat, and an animal buried in fur has
3:22almost no way to get rid of it. It can't
3:24sweat like you can. And it can't pant
3:26and gallop at the same time because it
3:27can't do both with the same breath. So
3:29every burst of speed costs it heat it
3:31can't pay back while it's still moving.
3:33The man is the opposite. His skin is
3:34nearly bare, covered in millions of tiny
3:36sweat glands cooling him with every
3:38step. He can pour out a liter of water
3:40an hour and just keep going. He is the
3:41only large animal on that whole plane
3:43that can run and cool itself down at the
3:45same time. So this was never a chase. It
3:47was slow, patient math, and the antelope
3:49was always going to lose. The sprints
3:51get shorter. the gaps close up. The
3:53animal's body climbs toward a
3:54temperature that will cook its own
3:56organs until its legs stop answering and
3:58it goes down in the dirt and doesn't get
4:00up. And it isn't because the man caught
4:01it, it's because its own body quit. He
4:03just walks the last few steps and
4:05finishes it without a fight. Now, some
4:06scientists will tell you this kind of
4:08hunting was actually rare and they argue
4:10about how much it really shaped us. They
4:11might be right, but rare or not, it
4:13shows you the design underneath. We were
4:15the thing that would not stop coming.
4:16Long before we picked up a single
4:18weapon, we were already the shape on the
4:19horizon that never turns back. But
4:21running an animal down takes hours. So,
4:23we found a way to end it in a single
4:24second from across the clearing. Pick up
4:26a rock. Notice how naturally your arm
4:28knows what to do with it. You could
4:29throw it at something across the street
4:31right now and have a real chance of
4:32hitting it. That feels like nothing, but
4:34it's one of the rarest abilities in all
4:35of nature. A chimpanzee is several times
4:37stronger than a grown man. Pound for
4:39pound, it would tear you apart, but it
4:41can only throw it about 20 miles an hour
4:43and it can barely aim. An 8-year-old kid
4:45can throw a baseball at 40. The weakest
4:46thing in the room throws twice as fast
4:48as the animal that could rip its arm
4:49off. So, how? The answer is hidden in
4:51your shoulder. Over millions of years,
4:53our bodies changed in three specific
4:55ways. The waist widened, so the upper
4:57body could twist on its own. The
4:58shoulders dropped and the bone in the
5:00upper arm untwisted. Together, those
5:01changes turned your shoulder into a
5:03slingshot. When you [ __ ] your arm back,
5:05you stretch the tendons across it like
5:06elastic, load them with energy, and then
5:08release it all at once to catapult your
5:10arm forward. It's the fastest motion the
5:12human body can make and it shows up in
5:14the fossil record around 2 million years
5:15ago in an ancestor called Homo erectus.
5:18Think about what that meant. Every other
5:20predator on Earth has to touch its prey
5:21to kill it. The lion has to close its
5:23jaws on you. The wolf has to reach you
5:24with its teeth. To eat, they have to
5:26walk right into the range of hooves and
5:27horns and they get hurt doing it. We
5:29didn't. We became the first animal that
5:31could kill from a distance, standing
5:33somewhere safe while the prey never got
5:34close enough to fight back. It started
5:36with a thrown rock, then a sharpened
5:38spear, then a spear you could launch
5:39even harder. And every weapon in human
5:41history since is just a longer, deadlier
5:43version of that same moment when a weak
5:45little primate realized it could reach
5:47out and end a life from across the
5:49clearing. But one human with a rock is
5:50still just one human. What turned us
5:52into a nightmare was what happened when
5:54we stood together. Watch a pride of
5:55lions hunt or a pack of wolves and it
5:57looks like teamwork. It isn't, not
5:59really. Each animal is just chasing it's
6:01own best shot at the prey and the
6:02results happen to line up. Chimps hunt
6:04in groups too and it's the same story
6:06with every chimp out for itself.
6:08Scientists call this hunting in I mode.
6:10Humans do something no other animal can.
6:12We hunt in we mode working from one
6:14shared plan. One of us drives the prey,
6:16others wait at the ambush. Someone
6:18signals and everyone adjusts at once
6:20because everyone is holding the same
6:21picture in their head. And here's the
6:23part nothing else alive can do. Each
6:25person knows that the others know the
6:26plan. You know that I know that we're
6:28doing this together. A wolf pack is just
6:30a group of wolves. A band of humans is
6:32one mind spread across a dozen bodies.
6:34It's a single intention with 30 pairs of
6:36hands and it can plan for tomorrow,
6:37remember yesterday and pass down
6:39everything it learns to the next
6:40generation. You're not scary because of
6:42your body. You already know your body is
6:44weak. You're scary because you were
6:45never really fighting as one person. You
6:47were always a piece of something much
6:49bigger and that something could think.
6:50So give that creature time. Give it the
6:52tireless legs, the throwing arm and the
6:54shared mind and turn it loose on a
6:56planet full of giants. Then look at
6:58what's left. In South Africa, there's a
6:59place called Kruger National Park home
7:01to one of the largest lion populations
7:03left on Earth. For every antelope and
7:05zebra living there, the lion is the
7:06sound that means death. So a team of
7:08scientists went in to test something
7:10simple. They wanted to know what those
7:11animals are most afraid of. They hid
7:13speakers and cameras at the watering
7:14holes, the one place every animal is
7:16forced to visit. Then they waited for
7:17the animals to come and drink and they
7:19started playing sounds. First, they
7:20played lions, real recordings of them
7:22snarling and growling close and loud.
7:25The animals lifted their heads and
7:26tensed and a few backed away. But most
7:28of them held their ground because a lion
7:29is a threat they've lived with their
7:31whole lives and learned to survive. Then
7:33the scientists played something else. It
7:34wasn't a roar and it wasn't a gunshot.
7:36It was just the sound of a few people
7:38talking calm and quiet at the the of a
7:40normal conversation. The savanna
7:42emptied. 95% of the animals ran. They
7:44were twice as likely to flee from the
7:46human voices as from the lions, and they
7:48cleared out 40% faster. Elephants,
7:50giraffes, rhinos, leopards, every one of
7:53them fled from the sound of people
7:54chatting. A zebra at a watering hole is
7:56more frightened of the sound of you
7:58talking than of a lion breathing down
7:59its neck. The scientists gave it a name.
8:01They called us the super predator. And
8:03this isn't just one park in Africa. On
8:05the other side of the world, in the
8:06mountains of California, scientists ran
8:08the same experiment on wild mountain
8:10lions. Some of the most powerful
8:11predators in all of North America. They
8:13waited until a lion was feeding on a
8:15fresh kill. And then they played the
8:16sound of people quietly talking. And the
8:18lion, an animal that fears almost
8:20nothing, would freeze, abandon its own
8:22food, and slip away into the dark. They
8:24get the same result nearly everywhere
8:25they try it. From the biggest cats down
8:27to the smallest mice, the entire natural
8:29world has quietly agreed on one thing.
8:31The most dangerous sound on the planet
8:33is a human voice. You've spent your
8:34whole life a little afraid of the wild.
8:36You're afraid of the dark, of the
8:37animals out there, of whatever waits at
8:39the edge of the firelight. But turn that
8:41around. You are carrying every piece of
8:43it right now. The tireless legs that ran
8:44the antelope into the ground, the arm
8:46that kills from across a clearing, and
8:48the shared mind that emptied whole
8:49continent. It's all still in you, right
8:51where you're sitting. To every other
8:52animal alive, you are not the one who's
8:54afraid of the dark. You are the thing in
8:55it. You are the monster they spent a
8:57million years learning to fear. And the
8:58most terrifying part is that you walk
9:00around every day, soft and slow and
9:02clawless, completely convinced you're
9:04the weak one, having forgotten what you
9:06actually are.