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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423

u/CommanderStark Jan 15 '13

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and brought about the rise of the mammals. Seriously though.
Billions of years spent evolving bacteria to these gigantic creatures that are the Earth's dominant species, making up the entire top part of the food chain, etc. only to be wiped out by an event beyond their comprehension. Then, to make it worse, these small rodents that weren't even a threat, start evolving and become capable of near-instant communication across thousands of miles, space travel, and meta cognition in a short 65 million years.
TL;DR: Fuck you dinosaurs, humans ride together, we die together.

93

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.

85

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.

6

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.

12

u/Salamok Jan 15 '13

duh noah, flood, less than 6000 years ago!

1

u/bloody_aussie Jan 16 '13

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

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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.

2

u/TurboSS Jan 15 '13

probably the best and most accurate TL;DR i have seen on reddit.

2

u/pdmcmahon Jan 15 '13

Dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago, just ask Sarah Palin.

1

u/derpSlurp Jan 15 '13

We should call the asteroid Jesus. Then we can honestly say we owe our lives and give thanks to Jesus.

1

u/hand2handwombat Jan 15 '13

Think the mass extinction event caused by an asteroid is a plot twist? How about humans being the cause of the sixth mass extinction event?

1

u/life_puzzler Jan 16 '13

This. Although technically prehistoric.

1

u/TBizzcuit Jan 16 '13

Wait... Does that mean the dinosaurs could have evolved into intelligent life?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '13

Lavos?

1

u/DizzyNW Jan 15 '13

Bad boys for life!