Ancient Humans vs. The Deadliest Animal on Earth

It is two in the morning, you hear that whine next to your ear, and you have a spray, a screen, a fan and a plug in the wall. Ancient humans had none of it - and the mosquito is still the deadliest animal on Earth. So what did they actually do? Smoke from a deliberately bad fire. A fishing net pulled over the bed, written down by a Greek tourist in Egypt 2,500 years ago. A 77,000-year-old grass bed with insect-repelling leaves laid on top. Villages built up a slope instead of down in the fertile valley. And a 1,700-year-old Chinese fever remedy that nobody could make work - until a scientist noticed one word in it and won a Nobel Prize. Chapters 0:00 2 a.m. - that sound 1:01 How she hunts you 1:45 Fire, made deliberately worse 2:11 How farming built the killer 3:25 The villages that moved uphill 3:49 Herodotus and the first mosquito net 4:56 Rome loses to an insect 6:02 Bark, quinine and your gin and tonic 6:38 Ge Hong's line, and 1971 7:37 Your room tonight Sources WHO World Malaria Report 2024 (263 million cases, 597,000 deaths, ~95% in Africa, 2.2 billion cases averted since 2000) Wadley et al., Science 2011 - 77,000-year-old bedding at Sibudu Cave, South Africa, topped with Cryptocarya woodii leaves Herodotus, Histories 2.95 - towers, wind, and the fisherman's net Marciniak et al., Current Biology 2016 - Plasmodium falciparum DNA in Roman skeletons; infant cemetery at Lugnano in Teverina, c. 450 CE Nature Heredity 2011 - sickle cell (HbS) and malaria resistance Ge Hong, Zhouhou Beiji Fang (c. 340 AD); Tu Youyou, Nobel Prize 2015 Human 1.0 - how people actually lived, before any of this was easy. New video every week. #ancienthistory #history #malaria #mosquitoes #archaeology