Gigantic Volcanic Eruption 74,000 Years Ago Almost Led to Extinction of Human Species

[Liffrea]

Newly discovered archaeological sites in southern and northern India have revealed how people lived before and after the colossal Toba volcanic eruption 74,000 years ago. Several theories suggest that the Toba eruption plunged the planet into a 6 to 10 year volcanic winter that endangered the world's human population, reducing it to 10,000 or a mere 1,000 breeding pairs. Some researchers argue that the Toba eruption produced a 1,000 year cooling episode.

An international, multidisciplinary research team, led by Oxford University in collaboration with Indian institutions, unveiled to a conference in Oxford what it calls 'Pompeii-like excavations' beneath the Toba ash. The seven-year project examines the environment that humans lived in, their stone tools, as well as the plants and animal bones of the time. The team has concluded that many forms of life survived the super-eruption, contrary to other research which has suggested significant animal extinctions and genetic bottlenecks.

According to the team, a potentially ground-breaking implication of the new work is that the species responsible for making the stone tools in India was Homo sapiens. Stone tool analysis has revealed that the artefacts consist of cores and flakes, which are classified in India as Middle Palaeolithic and are similar to those made by modern humans in Africa.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/03/supervolcanic-eruption-74000-years-ago-reduced-human-population-to-10000-a-weekend-classic-.html

[Osweo]

Fimbulwinter! :p

[Lenny]

Artifacts have been found in India immediately above and below a 2.4 meter thick layer of Toba ash. This shows that modern man was in India prior to Toba and survived it. Source (http://erectuswalksamongst.us/Chap20.html#Foot4)

[Note: The Toba Eruption was 74,000 years ago. HomoSapiens were in India at the time, we now know. More evidence against Out-of-Africa...]

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In Figure 20-1 (http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/2673/figure20201.gif), time goes from left to right and the number of people alive in Eurasia increases from the bottom to the top, but population size is very approximate. The arrows entering from the left symbolize the many lineages of mtDNA haplogroups that different populations living in Eurasia had prior to the eruption of Mt. Toba and the first ice age.[4] The two population crashes (dips in the curve) were caused by Toba and the two ice ages when large numbers of Eurasians starved to death. Some people in the M and N macrohaplogroups made it through the ice ages, but people in other haplogroups did not, resulting in a population “bottleneck” in the trough of the first ice age (and possibly the second, as well) and leaving the survivors with less variation. Source (http://erectuswalksamongst.us/Chap20.html#Back3)

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The afrocentrists’ [i.e., supporters of The Out-of-Africa Theory of Human Origins] explanation for the absence of Africans in the M and N macrohaplogroups is that any Africans who had M or N alleles “lost” them, i.e., they died without living descendants. But if M and N arose in Africa and the Africans had them, they were very probably beneficial or, at the very least, not harmful, so why would the Africans who had them die out? Africa was little affected by Toba and there were no disasters in Africa that could have wiped out populations in the M and N macro-haplogroups, but left populations in other haplogroups intact. The environment in Africa did not change drastically so as to turn harmless or beneficial alleles in the haplogroups of M and N into deadly liabilities. Rather than say that those alleles were so advantageous in Eurasia that the people having them were able to repopulate those two continents, but so deadly that in Africa that anyone having them died, it is far more likely that no one in Africa had the alleles in M and N until a few Eurasians brought them there. Source (http://erectuswalksamongst.us/Chap20.html#Back14)

[Tabiti]

Watched that on Discovery or NG (don't remember) documentary some time ago. They said that this eruption probably lead to the extinction of other humanoid groups like "hobbits" (Homo floresiensis).

[Lenny]

Watched that on Discovery or NG (don't remember) documentary some time ago. They said that this eruption probably lead to the extinction of other humanoid groups like "hobbits" (Homo floresiensis).
It may have destroyed their longterm viability, but the original Floresiensis skeleton discovered itself was dated at only 18,000 years ago. [Toba being 74,000 years ago].

It's quite possible that the last living Floriensis didn't die-out until relatively recently (the past millennium), but that they lived as marginals with tiny numbers for thousands and thousands of years before that.

[geffao]

Amazing us

[Ranger0075]

Awesome