Humanity is Feral

Source: Humanity is Feral, Cool Worlds, 2:04, uploaded 2026-01-26, playlist index 116.

Cool Worlds opens with the history of human knowledge. Humans evolved from hominins in Africa around two million years ago, spread across the globe, and worked out food production, forms of government, medicine, morality, monetary policy, and physics. As far as we know, nobody taught the species these things. Humanity learned them across a long stretch of time, which leaves the source of that knowledge open to question.

The forbidden experiment

Humans have often tried to find out where knowledge comes from. Cool Worlds gives two disturbing examples. The first is the story of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who allegedly locked away a group of infants and allowed contact only with wet nurses forbidden to speak or show expression. Frederick hoped that the children would begin speaking the original language of Adam and Eve without having learned a language from other people. Every child died before reaching the age when speech would normally develop.

A similar experiment is thought to have taken place under the Mughal Emperor Akbar in the sixteenth century. Akbar later reported hearing no cry or speech from the children. The source uses both stories to turn a question about language into a question about human contact. Children cannot develop through isolation, even when adults keep their bodies alive.

The point then becomes present tense. Solitary confinement is recognised as one of the harshest punishments a person can receive, and the video says that the United Nations has argued that isolation lasting longer than fifteen days can amount to torture. Isolation damages a person because human development depends on contact with other people.

Humanity as feral children

The source extends the infant experiment to the species as a whole. Humanity, it says, consists of Frederick’s feral children. We have had no parent, teacher, or guide outside our species to tell us what is right or wrong. The knowledge we have gathered has emerged through collective isolation, with people learning from other people inside the same human enclosure.

That analogy carries the video’s unsettling turn. If isolation can drive one person mad, the species has to ask what its own isolation has done. Humanity has been alone for its entire existence, as far as the video knows. The closing question asks whether the madness is finally catching up with us.

Limits

This is a speculative analogy rather than an account of established human madness. The Frederick II story is presented as alleged, the Akbar story as something historians think may have happened, and the UN position appears without a cited document. The video gives no source for its opening evolutionary history either. Its claim rests on the relation between the examples: human beings need contact to develop, while humanity has had no teacher outside itself.

The English captions end after the phrase “catching up with”, so the final wording is incomplete. The preceding sentence makes the intended subject clear enough to preserve the ending as an open question about humanity without supplying words the source does not contain.