The Most Terrifying Sound in Nature is the Human Voice

Animals are more afraid of the sound of a human voice than they are of a lion roar. This is not a metaphor — it is the result of peer-reviewed research conducted at waterholes across Africa. Prey animals fled human recordings at nearly double the rate they fled from actual predators. This video explores how three hundred thousand years of human hunting has encoded fear of us so deeply into the biology of animals worldwide that even newborns with no experience of humans still flee our voice. It explores what this fear is doing to ecosystems right now — silently, invisibly — and what the lockdown of 2020 revealed when the sound of humans briefly stopped. 🔔 Subscribe for more science explained simply.