Has There Ever Been a Day When No Human Died? | Smartest Year Ever (June 30, 2025)

Every day, over 150,000 people die—from illness, age, accidents, war, and everything in between. But Gordy asks a deceptively simple question: Has there ever been a day when no human died?

To find out, we dive deep into prehistoric population crashes, explore the Toba supervolcano, and run the numbers on what it would take to have a true deathless day in human history.

This episode of Smartest Year Ever blends population science, anthropology, mortality data, and genetics to answer one of the eeriest thought experiments of all time. If it ever happened... you probably didn’t hear about it.

Sources:

• World Health Organization. (2023). Global Health Estimates 2020: Deaths by Cause, Age, Sex, by Country and by Region. https://www.who.int/data/gho
  

• United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2022). World Population Prospects 2022. https://population.un.org/wpp/
  

• Gurven, M., & Kaplan, H. (2007). Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination. Population and Development Review, 33(2), 321–365.
  

• Ambrose, S. H. (1998). Late Pleistocene human population bottlenecks, volcanic winter, and differentiation of modern humans. Journal of Human Evolution, 34(6), 623–651.
  

• Arsuaga, J. L., et al. (2014). Traumatic lesions in a 430,000-year-old cranium. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(13), 4387–4392.
  

• Hovers, E., et al. (2000). Early human burial at Qafzeh Cave. Nature, 403(6771), 313–318.
  

• Maddison Project Database. (2020). Historical Population Estimates. University of Groningen. https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/
  

#HumanHistory #Anthropology #UnsolvedQuestions #humanmortality #didyouknow #anthropologyfacts #Dailyfacts #volcanos Music thanks to Zapsplat.