Sep 14, 2025 02:25 AM
A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived
https://theconversation.com/a-massive-er...ved-254782
INTRO: If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years.
While the volcano is located in what’s now Indonesia, living organisms across the entire globe were potentially affected. As an archaeologist who specializes in studying volcanic eruptions of the past, I often think about how incredible it is that humans survived this extinction-level event that was over 10,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.
The Toba supereruption ejected 672 cubic miles (2,800 km³) of volcanic ash into the stratosphere, producing an enormous crater roughly 1,000 football fields in length (62 x 18 miles, or 100 x 30 kilometers). An eruption this size would have produced black skies blocking most of the sunlight, potentially causing years of global cooling. Closer to the volcano, acid rain would have contaminated water supplies, and thick layers of ash would have buried animals and vegetation.
With all those odds stacked against Homo sapiens as a species, how did we survive to piece together the story today?
Human populations living in close proximity to the Toba volcano were probably completely wiped out. Whether people on other parts of the globe were affected is a question that scientists are still investigating.
The Toba catastrophe hypothesis was one prominent school of thought for many years. It proposes that the Toba supereruption caused a global cooling event that lasted up to six years. Its effects, according to the hypothesis, caused human population sizes to plummet to fewer than 10,000 individual people living on Earth.
This scenario is supported by genetic evidence found in the genomes of people alive today. Our DNA suggests that modern humans spread into separate regions around 100,000 years ago and then shortly after that experienced what scientists call a genetic bottleneck: an event, such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak, that leads to a large decline in population sizes. These calamities drastically reduce the genetic diversity in a group.
Whether this apparent reduction in human population size resulted from the Toba supereruption or some other factor is heavily debated. As scientists collect more data from climate, environmental and archaeological records, we can begin to understand what conditions were most important for human survival... (MORE - details)
https://theconversation.com/a-massive-er...ved-254782
INTRO: If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years.
While the volcano is located in what’s now Indonesia, living organisms across the entire globe were potentially affected. As an archaeologist who specializes in studying volcanic eruptions of the past, I often think about how incredible it is that humans survived this extinction-level event that was over 10,000 times larger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.
The Toba supereruption ejected 672 cubic miles (2,800 km³) of volcanic ash into the stratosphere, producing an enormous crater roughly 1,000 football fields in length (62 x 18 miles, or 100 x 30 kilometers). An eruption this size would have produced black skies blocking most of the sunlight, potentially causing years of global cooling. Closer to the volcano, acid rain would have contaminated water supplies, and thick layers of ash would have buried animals and vegetation.
With all those odds stacked against Homo sapiens as a species, how did we survive to piece together the story today?
Human populations living in close proximity to the Toba volcano were probably completely wiped out. Whether people on other parts of the globe were affected is a question that scientists are still investigating.
The Toba catastrophe hypothesis was one prominent school of thought for many years. It proposes that the Toba supereruption caused a global cooling event that lasted up to six years. Its effects, according to the hypothesis, caused human population sizes to plummet to fewer than 10,000 individual people living on Earth.
This scenario is supported by genetic evidence found in the genomes of people alive today. Our DNA suggests that modern humans spread into separate regions around 100,000 years ago and then shortly after that experienced what scientists call a genetic bottleneck: an event, such as a natural disaster or disease outbreak, that leads to a large decline in population sizes. These calamities drastically reduce the genetic diversity in a group.
Whether this apparent reduction in human population size resulted from the Toba supereruption or some other factor is heavily debated. As scientists collect more data from climate, environmental and archaeological records, we can begin to understand what conditions were most important for human survival... (MORE - details)