In this paper, a distributed adaptive event-triggered control approach is proposed for the consensus problem of high-order multi-agent systems (MASs) with unknown dynamics and external disturbances. First, to save communication resources, the event-triggered control is proposed to ensure the consensus of MASs, where the trigger condition is established based on the neighbors’ information. The approximation properties of neural networks are used to address the unknown dynamics and external disturbances. Second, rigorous theoretical analysis proves that the MASs can achieve the leader-following consensus, as long as the communication graph of MASs contains a spanning tree with the leader as the root node. The filtered tracking errors and adaptive parameters estimated errors are proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded without Zeno behavior. Finally, the simulations and experiments illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the theoretical results.