74,000 BP = Mount Toba Eruption - Ancient Humans Unscathed, Study Claims

[L. Coyote]

Friday, July 6th, 2007
Mount Toba Eruption - Ancient Humans Unscathed, Study Claims
http://www.livescience.com/history/070809_aqua_dig.html

At about 74,000 years ago, Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra erupted in a massive explosion that supposedly rocked the Middle Palaeolithic world to its very foundations, bringing contemporary human populations to their knees, reducing global to around 15,000 individuals, thereby precipitating a so-called bottle-neck of human evolution, as proposed by Stanley Ambrose, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discussed in this BBC News article from 1998, and in an essay at the Bradshaw Foundation, in the same year. However, recent discoveries made by Michael Petraglia, from the University of Cambridge, have now cast doubt on this theory…

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Population Bottlenecks and Volcanic Winter
http://www.jqjacobs.net/anthro/paleo/bottleneck.html

[Jed Dilligan]

1. Wrong link?

I'm getting the English Channel dig article from your first link.

[L. Coyote]

2. Try this link instead: Mount Toba Eruption - Ancient Humans Unscathed

http://anthropology.net/2007/07/06/mount-toba-eruption-ancient-humans-unscathed-study-claims/

Sorry. Too much awesome Anthro news at once, I guess!

[semillama]

3. Thanks for posting the right link

That's a fascinating article. It really underscores the point that the evolution of human behavior is way more complex than some people would like to think.

Plus, the article links to John Hawks weblog, which I of course had to bookmark!

[applegrove]

4. I didn't know Toba erupted so close to where we are now. Amazing

any human mammal survived.