This Ancient War Almost Wiped Out Humanity (Michael Button)

A prehistoric catastrophe wiped out 95% of all men across Africa, Europe, and Asia

A few years ago, researchers studying the genomes of modern people made an unsettling discovery. At some point a few thousand years ago, genetic diversity among men suddenly collapsed. Entire male bloodlines vanished.

What they found wasn’t subtle. The data pointed to a staggering collapse in male genetic diversity — as if the world’s population of men had been almost completely wiped out. Models suggest that up to ninety-five percent of males in Africa, Europe, and Asia disappeared from the gene pool during this period. It’s one of the most dramatic population crashes ever recorded



The clip provides evidence of males killing off other males, in multiple massacres, in Neolithic wars, or did something else happen along with this extreme violence? If there were severe shifts in climate early farming communities could have gone to war against each other as farmed food became scarce. Some raiding groups may have been in the hands of megalomaniacal killers. 

Additional editorial comment:

The males apparently died out 6 to 7 thousand years ago, during the farming revolution, but not the females. There's evidence they died in massacres, or in warfare, on a wide scale. It's possible that climatic pressures, or geological events made certain groups attack and kill other groups, which would be done by the male population. It looks like there was a lot of very one sided massacring happening. There's also evidence of cannibalism. We really do not know what happened because it was so long ago, but the genetic data is pretty disturbing when taken with analysis of ancient burials (with so many males showing signs of violent deaths).

This video makes me think of two things. That talk about Neanderthals and Modern Humans getting along, and comingling, so that we carry some of their genes, was more likely because their males were massacred by our own species, and two; that different groups of humans seems to have trouble getting along with each other, at least historically, and it's important to keep that in mind.

[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, November 7, 2025.]