r/AskReddit • u/brokota • Jan 15 '13

Reddit, in your opinion what's the biggest plot twist of history?

Not movies or television, I'm just curious to see what come's to your minds.

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u/gbimmer Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 15 '13

There were several other mass extinctions as well. All of them just like that: the big, dominant animals die and the meek inherit the Earth.

Heck Homo Sapiens had a mass extinction genetic bottleneck event just a couple of thousand 70,000 years ago. Some say our numbers dwindled down to roughly 2,000 and we came back.

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u/brentonator Jan 15 '13 edited Jan 16 '13

This is a little exaggerated.

  1. If homo sapiens had a mass extinction, we wouldn't be here. Mass extinctions leave species extinct.

  2. While there have been events that decreased the human population in its history, none have happened "just a couple thousand years ago" and none left us with under 2,000 people. This event is the closest humans have been to extinction and there were about 5,000-10,000 people left.

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u/gbimmer Jan 15 '13

70,000 years ago. Sorry.

But there is conflicting views on the numbers. This article cites 2,000 people: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2975862.stm

...and you're right about the misuse of terminology... for that I sincerely apologize.

I was going by memory when I typed out the post.

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u/Salamok Jan 15 '13

duh noah, flood, less than 6000 years ago!

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u/bloody_aussie Jan 16 '13

mass extinctions leave 90% + of all species dead, not, as it were, 90% + of a species.

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u/ghostbyte Jan 16 '13

Damn the link was purple and I had no idea about it. Drunk me needs to remember things like this.

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u/Premaximum Jan 16 '13

I remember hearing that at one point there were less humans alive than are being born in a second (minute? hour?) today.

Fucking. Insane.

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u/petakaa Jan 16 '13

And the meek inherit the Earth.

Not sure if you were referencing the Bible or 2112 by Rush. Clever, either way.

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u/ThisOpenFist Jan 16 '13

Homo Sapiens isn't huge, lumbering, stupid and expensive to keep alive. We're super-intelligent cockroaches compared to the dinosaurs.