How Humans Nearly Went Extinct in 70,000 BC
The Toba event- a super-volcano almost wiped the human race out.
40 breeding pairs....A study led by molecular biologists at Oxford has concluded that human beings were once reduced to roughly a thousand reproductive adults, while author Sam Kean believes he’s found evidence that suggests that number dips to only forty. It’s hard to fully take in this fascinating revelation because of its implication. How could only a thousand breeding pairs expand to 7.8 billion people? Bottleneck effect.
Around 70,000 BC, a volcano called Toba, in Indonesia, erupted. It wasn’t an ordinary volcano. Roughly 650 miles of vaporized rock was blown into the air. It’s considered the largest volcanic eruption that we know of, and it’s not even close.
To put Toba into perspective, in 1980, Mount St. Helens ejected 1 cubic kilometer of rock. In 79 CE, Vesuvius ejected 3 cubic kilometers of rock and material, and in 1815 the Tambora eruption unleashed an unholy 80 cubic kilometers. The Toba eruption? An unfathomable 2,800 cubic kilometers of material. The layers of ash that erupted from Toba are still visible all over South Asia and the Indian Ocean.Read the rest of the article at the link.With the Toba eruption ejecting so much material into the air, dust and ash settled high in the sky, likely dimming the sun for up to 6 years. It’s not hard to imagine how difficult and unpleasant life on Earth with a dimmed sun would be, but for early humans it proved nearly fatal. The lack of sunlight and the effects of the eruption disrupted seasonal rains, choked off streams, and even made berries, trees, and fruits scarce. Hot ash pummeled trees and forests, leading to mass starvation as human beings struggled to find sustenance in an environment where food was buried under the remains of Tuba’s eruption. Many scientists believe that this was the period in which the human population experienced the bottleneck effect.
Some have argued that with the ash hanging in the air, a cold planet got even cooler. The plains of East Africa may have dropped 20 degrees in temperature, causing even further hardship to the small band of surviving humans.