18 Worst Time Periods You'd Never Survive In

After the past few years of unpleasantly eventful events, it's common to read comments like "I'm ready for some precedented times" or "I didn't want to live through history." These are easy emotions to sympathize with. News feeds can seem like they're working from Stephen King or David Lynch storyboards, and occasionally, there are multiple bad news live feeds tracking different fiascos vying for attention. Modern life has very little chill indeed.

Unfortunately for time-traveling wish-casters, the human experience has seldom been smooth sailing. Grimy times are simply part of living in the world, and human history (and prehistory, to the extent we can reconstruct it) is punctuated by plagues, famines, wars, natural disasters, and good old-fashioned interconnected upheavals. And while the 2020s probably won't wind up striking future history students as a pleasantly relaxing decade to have lived through, they're also not the worst stretch of time human beings have had to survive.

Any species needs a certain baseline breeding population to maintain genetic diversity, in large part because genetic diversity helps a species adapt to changes. With a greater number of genes available, the odds that one will be helpful in a new situation increases. When a population is reduced in numbers for whatever reason, some of this potentially helpful diversity is lost.

This apparently happened to human ancestors nearly a million years ago. Using a detailed analysis of population genetics that allows for estimation of past population size, scientists at East China Normal University found that some 900,000 years ago, give or take, the population of modern humans' direct ancestors tanked to about 1280 reproductive individuals ... and that this small population size persisted for over 100,000 years. There's no direct evidence of what caused this decline, but the dates align with a known period of climate change that forced extinctions and changes in other species.

The study estimated that about two-thirds of the genetic diversity present in the human population today was lost when the population crashed to the size of a high school. This unrecorded event may be our closest call to extinction so far.

When the most recent major ice age arrived about 115,000 years ago, modern humans still had cousins floating around. Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, Denisovans, and Neanderthals still populated particular areas. Only one of these species, Homo sapiens (us), survived the cold spell into modern times, with theories varying about why the others died and we survived.

The most popular, if grim, is that we simply outcompeted our sister hominid groups, spreading into their terrain and perhaps even exterminating them in a foreshadowing of colonial invasions millennia later. They may also have been weakened by climate changes within the broader Ice Age, with particularly cold and dry periods in Europe savaging Neanderthal populations, for example. Homo sapiens emerged in relatively warm Africa, insulated from the worst of the climate ructions, and may simply have been in the right place at the right time.

Scholars additionally point to certain advantages Homo sapiens seems to have enjoyed, including a better ability to form social bonds through symbolic thought and anatomy better suited to the complexities of language. Our chatty, group-forming species may simply have had what it took to cooperate and thence to thrive where our near cousins fell short.

Bored and cooped up during a rainy trip to Geneva in 1816, Mary Shelley began writing "Frankenstein," a linchpin text of modern science fiction and horror inspired in part by the gloom of her surroundings. One wonders what she might have written had she known that the unseasonable coolness and unrelenting wet weather were the result of a volcano on the far side of the world whose eruption had killed thousands — and was just getting started.

In April 1815, Mt. Tambora, an Indonesian volcano, blew its top. It smashed the island of Sumbawa so badly that one of the island's languages died, with virtually all of its speakers falling prey to the blast. An estimated 10,000 locals became victims of landslides, tsunamis, and subsequent disease. They would be joined by victims of the volcanic winter that followed as the colossal amount of sulfur dioxide the eruption released spread across the globe, cooling global temperatures by up to three degrees Celsius. In much of the world, the summer of 1816 never really arrived, leading to the popular name of the Year Without a Summer. Additionally, skewed rainfall patterns meant that crops failed in much of Europe and North America, including Switzerland, which was among the worst-impacted regions. 

Over 100,000 people worldwide probably died due to the temporary climate disruption of the Year Without a Summer, in addition to those lost in the immediate area of Mt. Tambora. A bright spot, if perhaps cold comfort to the dead and those that loved them, is that the well-recorded event encouraged the study of the atmosphere and climate, with interdisciplinary examinations of the eruption and its aftermath continuing to this day.

In 165 C.E., Roman soldiers returning from the sack of Seleucia, near modern Baghdad, carried home an unexpected war prize in the devastating Antonine Plague. Probably, but not proven to be smallpox, the plague swept across the Roman world, causing rashes, bloody excreta, and the deaths of perhaps a third of the 60 million-ish people within the sprawling Roman empire.

The first wave killed an estimated 2,000 residents of Rome each day at its peak, which seems unfathomable until you hear that the second wave reportedly carried off 5,000 daily at its peak. Two emperors died of the illness: Lucius Verus, who had led the troops in Seleucia, and famous stoic Marcus Aurelius. The deaths hollowed out the empire's military forces and tax base so severely that the plague is occasionally presented as a root cause of the fall of the western Roman Empire. The Romans were so horrified by the plague that they attributed it to divine vengeance for some sacriliege committed in Mesopotamia ... or perhaps those pesky Christians. German fighters did manage to cross the Rhine in 167 C.E., forcing their way past the enfeebled Roman army (though when they found all the collapsing Romans covered in rashes, they may well have wished they'd stayed put).

Much of what we know about the actual ailment behind the plague comes from Galen, the observant but usually incorrect physician on whose work Western and Arab medicine rested for hundreds of years. Galen himself was in Rome when the plague broke out, recording valuable descriptions of the disease before wisely skedaddling to his native Pergamum in Asia. He lived into his late 80s and died in about 217, escaping the epidemic he described so vividly for posterity.

A series of religious wars in the hot, arid Middle East may already sound both unappealing and evergreen, but stick with us. The Crusades were harder to survive than you may have thought. Defined broadly to include religious wars of conquest with papal approval (thus including not only Christian attempts to seize the Holy Land, but also the Reconquista of southern Iberia, various campaigns against so-called heretics, and campaigns against pagans in the Baltic), the Crusades lasted from the 1090s to sometime in the early 1500s and affected huge swathes of the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. 

Atrocities like the sack of Jerusalem and Constantinople and Béziers and Antioch (etc.) were commonplace, with defenders of cities massacred alongside civilians and survivors often sold into slavery. Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land sometimes detoured to attack Jewish communities, with the Jews of the Rhineland encountering particular savagery. A true death toll for a set of conflicts so wide-ranging in time and space is difficult to tally, but they start at one million, with credible estimates topping out at nine million ... just for the Crusades to the Middle East, excluding violence within Europe. Readers with an eye for irony will note that today, Christianity remains disunified, Muslim countries still govern most of the Middle East and North Africa, and Jerusalem remains contested ... but hey, at least the Crusades (may have) introduced the apricot to (parts of) Europe!

The Defenestration of Prague sounds playful enough. What could be the harm in throwing a couple of government officials out of a window? This event would snowball into the Bohemian Revolt, which saw the Czechs try to replace their Catholic Habsburg rulers with a Protestant king. This revolt, in turn, would draw in most of the powers of Europe and give rise to one of the deadliest wars in history. The Thirty Years' War was a series of interconnected conflicts that drove the overall population of Germany down by 20%. Across the worst-hit areas in central Germany, losses may have hit 50%.

As is often the case in major wars, battlefield deaths accounted for only a fraction of the overall toll. Famine took its share of victims, which was unsurprising given the population displacements and the vast amounts of food requisitioned to feed the armies surging across the map. These movements of people led to outbreaks of disease, which took on xenophobic descriptions given the tensions. Typhus received the nickname Hungarian fever, while an outbreak of plague was blamed on Swedes. Desperate people looking to blame others took their frustrations out in pogroms against Jews and an upswelling of witch trials. 

To give just one example of the scale of the devastation, the Swedish army alone is reported as destroying over 20,000 castles, villages, and towns during its involvement in the war — and they came in late, only really turning their full attention from border squabbles with Russia and Poland to the major war in about 1630. The level of death and destruction Europe saw during the three decades of the war had no real competition until the Eastern Front of World War II some 300 years later.

The Taiping Rebellion, which rocked the Chinese state from 1850 to 1864, makes the American Civil War look like small potatoes indeed. By the time the dust cleared and bodies were as tallied as possible, the 14 years of war had swept some 20 million Chinese people into the next world and briefly seemed to threaten the very survival of the Qing dynasty. In the end, the Qing state did triumph, at a gargantuan cost in blood and treasure, only to be toppled less than 50 years later. By the time of the Communist victory in 1949 (several wars later), some of the worst-affected areas of China still had not shaken off the damage of the Taiping Rebellion.

The war's origins lie in an improbable series of events. A man named Hong Xiuquan failed the exams to join the imperial bureaucracy (thrice), got sick, and, uh, decided he was the son of the Christian God (the better-known Jesus was purportedly Hong's elder brother) destined to rule China.  The Qing emperors were ethnically Manchu, a.k.a. not Chinese, and so a credo preaching against these outside rulers while otherwise preaching a proto-Communist sharing of property attracted a number of Chinese civilians. 

The growing Taiping army took the major city of Nanjing in 1853 and made it the capital from which the rest of the war was directed. An Anglo-American-supported Qing army saved Shanghai from the Taiping in 1860, and this defeat, which came on the heels of defections by some Taiping officers, led to the unraveling of the rebellion. In the summer of 1864, a million fighters met at the Battle of Nanjing, which ended in the fall of the city to Qing forces and the deaths by fire and sword of most of the defenders.

The year 1066 is probably the single best-known date in English history, marking the year when the Duke of Normandy, William the Conqueror, brought his cavalry across the English channel (imagine the smell on those boats), thwomped the local infantry, and made England a bit more French. To England's credit, they lost in part because they had just fought off a Norwegian invasion at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. William's quick victory on the battlefield of Hastings isn't the whole story, though. Duke William successfully got most of the south to knuckle under, but northern England resisted the changing order, with the great city of York emerging as a center of rebellion.

Forced to make his third trip north in two years and faced with interference from Denmark (always hungry for a bite of England), Duke William stayed in York for the Christmas of 1069. His gift to himself was an utterly ravaged northern England. Rebels were hunted down and butchered, monasteries were looted to pay allies for campaigning in the grimy English winter, and large swathes of land were ruined to make further resistance impossible. This strategy of deliberate deprivation forced the most desperate survivors into cannibalism. William's destruction was so severe that when the Domesday Book was compiled to survey the kingdom some years later, huge chunks of the country were simply described as wasteland. Yorkshire may have had a mere 25% of its 1066 population in 1086. 

William is said to have regretted his savagery on his deathbed. Most Yorkshiremen could not be reached for comment as they were still dead.

One of the massive, overarching narratives of human history is the post-contact spread of disease, when American populations were first exposed to communicable diseases brought along with explorers, conquerors, and colonists. This introduction of smallpox, measles, influenza, and a host of other germs did more damage to the native populations than the most bloody-minded conquistador could even dream, with populations of indigenous groups across the western hemisphere dropping by 50% to 90% in the 200 years after contact.

One of the most terrible chapters in this already grim history is the outbreaks of cocoliztli, which ravaged the remaining indigenous populations of Mexico in waves from 1545. The exact agent of disease is unknown but suspected (at least in some cases) to be a relative of salmonella of food poisoning fame, to which the natives may have had no resistance. Other researchers propose a viral hemorrhagic fever broadly similar to Ebola. Whatever the cause, cocoliztli sufferers hallucinated, convulsed, and bled, with their skin turning yellow from jaundice. While these symptoms are unusual in salmonella infections, scientists note that such dramatic signs may appear if the body is wholly overwhelmed by a bacterial infection.

Drought and other diseases that were introduced might have weakened native populations, making them more susceptible to infection by the cocoliztli agent or agents. Between 7 and 17 million of the remaining native population of Mexico is estimated to have died in the two big waves of cocoliztli in 1545 and 1576, following an initial killer wave of smallpox between 1519 and 1520 that killed 5 to 8 million. It's sobering to imagine both the scale of this destruction and the hypothetical world in which the Americas incubated their own killer pathogen to be carried back to Europe to harrow the populations of London and Paris.

Even for readers used to the excesses of colonialism, the viciousness and cynicism that led to the Congo Free State are hard to imagine. At the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884-1885, European powers divvying up interests in Africa, especially around the Congo River basin, formalized existing investments by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, granting him control of the massive Congo Free State. Leopold wasn't granted this vast territory as king of Belgium to give the little beer-loving country a colony, but in his capacity as a private investor interested in exploiting the vast heart of Africa.

Exploit Leopold did. The Congo Free State existed to produce as much palm oil, ivory, and rubber as could be exported to enrich Leopold. To force workers into ever more backbreaking productivity, Leopold's forces kidnapped workers' families to coerce them to work harder. Rebellions were met not just with slaughter and arson but with mutilation. The hands of Congolese (adults and children) were severed and presented by soldiers to their higher-ups as an accounting of their action breaking revolt among the Congolese. During the mere 23 years of Leopold's rule, the population of the Congo Free State may have dropped from 20 million to 8 million. 

This savagery could not be concealed forever, and public outcry grew worldwide and in Belgium, which was not even directly profiting from the wickedness their king was up to. In fact, the Belgians got so angry that they forced Leopold to give his colony up to Belgium itself. Belgium took control of the territory as the Belgian Congo in 1908 and ruled the colony until its independence in 1960.

Around 1200 BCE, something terrible happened in the eastern Mediterranean. We don't know exactly what, but it was so bad that over the course of about a century, cities were abandoned, polities were smashed, and records in some areas simply stopped for a while, with some writing systems apparently never even being used again after the ... whatever. The Bronze Age Collapse, as modern people call it, marked the end of one great phase of the ancient world, with only a weakened Egypt surviving among the major states of the Near East and Mediterranean.

Currently, scholarly consensus posits a constellation of causes for this collapse. Under this hypothesis, climate change (as ever) conspired with natural disasters, internal unrest, and invasions by poorly attested but apparently terrifying Sea Peoples from the west, ultimately collapsing states, civilizations, and long-standing trade networks. In some cases, researchers can find equivocal evidence. Did people abandon a city because it was conquered, because of civil war, or because an earthquake made it uninhabitable?

Canaanite cities, the Hittite Empire, Ugarit, Mycenaean Greece, and many smaller or less well-known states fell under the wheels of fate during this great upheaval. Art, trade, and diplomacy took centuries to recover from the disruption. Civilization — and life — went on, but smaller, less grand, and less glittering than before.

The War of the Triple Alliance, also called the Paraguayan War, pitted small, landlocked Paraguay against its mightier neighbors Brazil and Argentina, with Uruguay joining the latter. Over the six years from 1864 to 1870, Paraguay's population dropped to under half of its prewar total, but even this shocking number conceals the fact that about 90% of Paraguayan men died. A mere 28,000 of the 221,000 Paraguayans left alive in the summer of 1870 were male.

The fatally optimistic dictator of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, disapproved of Brazilian interference in Uruguayan affairs (gotta keep your 'guays straight in this story) and declared war on the larger power. Argentina, seeing an opportunity, joined Brazil in attempting to explain to Paraguay that no, just because it had the biggest army in South America at 50,000 men did not mean it was actually a major power. The alliance blockaded the all-important rivers leading into Paraguay and proceeded with a slow, grinding invasion, chipping away at a Paraguayan resistance fortified by the brutal control Lopez exercised over his countrymen. Eventually, Paraguay's capital, Asuncion, fell, and Lopez was shot while trying to command an insurgency.

Some people have argued that Paraguay never really recovered. It lost a colossal amount of population and a fair bit of land to the victorious alliance and, to settle its massive war debt, sold off a good deal of public land. Even now, at least 14% of the farmland in Paraguay is controlled by Brazilian interests. Additionally, some experts blame the high rates of gender violence and strict abortion laws of modern Paraguay partly on fallout from the war. The few men left felt they could call all the shots, and their great-grandsons still do today.

The famous Black Death of medieval Europe wasn't the first time the world was faced with a devastating wave of bubonic plague. In the 540s, as antiquity drew to a close, the now-famous disease appeared in Egypt, quickly spreading along sea trade routes into one of the great cities of the world, Constantinople, capital of (what was left of) the Roman Empire. We know that over the 200 years during which the plague recurred in waves, it affected much of Europe and the Middle East, but our best sources are from the first wave in the Byzantine Empire and offer our first real descriptions of this disease that looms so large in human history.

The afflicted developed the telltale buboes (which result from lymph nodes overwhelmed by multiplying bacteria), and the death rate soon outpaced efforts to manage the spread of infection or to manage remains as families wished. Over 60% of the infected died, and so the Emperor Justinian (after whom the plague is named) began ordering mass burials outside the city's famous walls, piling corpses in towers, and pushing boats full of the dead into the sea and setting them alight. Justinian himself contracted the disease but survived it. 

The plague has been put forward, along with any number of other events, as the line between antiquity and the medieval period. Later research has shown that the pestilence was an urban phenomenon. The Justinianic Plague whacked the crowded cities but does not seem to have spread into rural areas enough to drive down population or agricultural productivity. It would take the even worse Black Death to do that.

Say what you will about Mao Zedong, as long as it includes a comment about how his reckless attempts to jumpstart China's economic development starved millions of ordinary Chinese people in the middle of the 20th century. Stalin's plans for the Soviet Union had placed heavy industry at the center of its economic goals — never mind the misery Stalin's decisions in general caused the Soviet people — and Mao was eager to replicate what he managed to think of as Stalin's success. Hence, Mao came up with the Great Leap Forward, an economic plan that transferred farmers, who make food, to mining and industrial concerns, which make products that cannot be eaten.

From 1959, rural people were denied the opportunity to grow their own food, and what grain was produced was redirected to cities and various governing elites. Adding insult to injury, the new industrial projects made crappy cast iron, not even steel. A drought between 1960 and 1961 only worsened the situation. China imported grain and reverted some of the changes in 1961, but over the two years of the manmade famine, 16.5 to 40 million people starved.

Estimates for the famine's death toll vary for the same reason it's seldom publicly discussed in China today, the government's strict control of information. Outsiders weren't even able to estimate the number of deaths until a census report in 1982 was made public. In recent decades, Chinese researchers have begun to study the famine and collect oral histories from survivors, with some of the work available in English.

Here's a statistic you've probably never seen before: grains resulting per grain sown. Medieval English farmers could reasonably hope to get seven grains reaped for every one they sowed, but 1315's anomalously cool and wet weather meant that for each grain sown, they harvested half a grain. This weather lasted two years across Britain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia, sparing sunnier Iberia and Italy. 

England's King Edward II, better known for having been overthrown by his wife a few years later, tried to freeze prices to keep the prices of what food remained from spiraling out of the reach of common people, which didn't work. After two years without a successful harvest, it was one of the biggest famines in world history. Even the rich were hit, as the economy that sustained them simply couldn't function without food production. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury had to sell his treasures to keep body and soul together. The constant wetness caused disease to spread among surviving animals, and some coastal areas of the Low Countries were abandoned by people who wanted to at least starve with dry feet. It was even too wet to salt-cure meat for preservation.

Estimates of premodern death tolls among people who are not kings or at least close to them are usually vague, but perhaps 5% of England died over these hungry years. Additionally, this subsistence crisis may have made the Black Death, which hit some 30 years later, even worse. Children who experience serious hunger never quite have the same immune strength as their consistently well-fed peers, and so those who survived the famine in their youth may have been all the more susceptible to the plague that struck them at maturity.

The Maya people of Central America produced one of the most culturally rich and complex societies in the pre-contact Americas, building stone cities that stand today and covering them with murals and pictographic writing that has allowed some of their long history to be pieced together centuries after the fact. And they did all this without having developed the wheel. But at some point between 750 and 950 C.E., this sparkling culture sputtered and crashed. Maya people survived (and do so today), but many of their cities were left to the jungle in two waves of apparent collapse and abandonment that struck different areas at different times.

Almost as many theories have sprung up to explain the Maya collapse as have been posited for the fall of Rome. How does a literate, sophisticated, wealthy society just tank? The leading contender is the same sword hanging over our heads right now: climate change leading to political instability. Severe droughts seem to have struck the region, which could have led to people fleeing in search of fertile land or food and/or turning on their elites. In some cities, artworks or buildings under construction seem to have been abandoned uncompleted, as though something happened abruptly, and the royal family of Cancun appears to have been slain.

Barring the discovery of an explanation carved in stone during a crisis — here's why our civilization is collapsing — a final cause of death for the Maya Golden Age is unlikely to be determined. The sudden end of this society should at least warn against hubris. If it happened once, it might well happen again.

The Black Death continues to fascinate modern people because it's fairly well documented for a premodern event and because it was very, very bad. From an origin point probably in China or inner Asia, the bubonic plague made a dramatic resurgence across Eurasia, landing in a Black Sea port, taking ship to Italy, and then spreading through effectively all of Europe. The slow spread at the speed of horses and ships is astonishing for people who remember COVID-19's three-year leap from Italy to Scotland!

The plague, spread by rats who loved towns and the yummy debris within, was especially bad in cities. The close quarters of monasteries and nunneries especially encouraged its spread. A queen of Aragon, a king of Castile, and a teenage English princess headed to her wedding were among the most notable victims, but these crowned heads were joined in death by an estimated 40 to 60% of the European population. Estimates vary widely, as did local death rates across Europe.

The plague would recur intermittently across the following centuries, with a final terrifying flourish hitting London between 1665 and 1666, carrying away 15% of the population of the English capital. A third plague pandemic, after the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death, began when a slow-burn outbreak in China reached Hong Kong in 1894, spreading into many corners of the world and particularly savaging India before subsiding, though not disappearing until 1959.

When the Austrian and Russian empires shattered under the strain of World War I, an independent Ukrainian state briefly emerged from the rubble. Unfortunately, it didn't take the Russian-led Soviet Union very long to regain its appetite for conquest (and for Kiev), and the Ukrainian state was forcibly brought into the Soviet state by the end of 1921. Lenin allowed the Ukrainians a degree of desired cultural autonomy and local control, but this was to end under the rule of his successor, Joseph Stalin.

Stalin, ironically enough from Georgia himself, another culturally distinct region dominated by Russia, wanted to break Ukraine to render it unable to potentially seek a future outside Russia. Stalin brought fertile Ukraine under direct central control and proceeded to weaponize the very productivity of the country against it. Through high quotas for grain production, controls on internal movement, and export of food supplies into the rest of Soviet Union, Stalin and his flunkies engineered a famine, going so far as to blockade unproductive villages that failed to meet unreasonable targets. By June of 1933, 28,000 Ukrainians were starving per day, and some 13% of the population likely died.

Since the 1950s, historians have generally considered the Holodomor a genocide. Russian authorities continue to deny the intentional nature of the famine.