Nassim Taleb uses the story of the one-year-old goose, so content that the nice humans have always and ever allowed her to get bigger and bigger. Then Thanksgiving happens. Over the hundreds of thousands of years of its actual existence, humanity has seen massive setbacks, inclusive of a moment when no more than a few thousands of us were alive, it was 70'000 years ago, it's in our genes. It is also very possible that there were previous periods with written records. We just don't have those.