These early humans survived a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago

These early humans survived a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago

  • March 21, 2018
Table of Contents

These early humans survived a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago

It’s one of the biggest mysteries of recent human evolution. Roughly 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens went through a genetic bottleneck, a period when our genetic diversity shrank dramatically. But why?

In the late 1990s, some scientists argued that the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption from what is now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, about 74,000 years ago, whose deadly effects reduced our species to a few thousand hardy individuals. Now, new evidence suggests we were right about the volcano—but wrong about pretty much everything else.

Source: arstechnica.com

Tags :
Share :
comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts

Did plants cause one of Earth’s great extinctions?

Did plants cause one of Earth’s great extinctions?

Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago.

Read More
The virus hunter: In a bygone era, C.J. Peters learned how to bend the rules

The virus hunter: In a bygone era, C.J. Peters learned how to bend the rules

Read More
Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

Ancient DNA Is Rewriting Human and Neanderthal History

Geneticist David Reich used to study the living, but now he studies the dead. The precipitating event came in the form of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave. So well-preserved were the bones that they yielded enough DNA for sequencing, and it became Reich’s job in 2007 to analyze the DNA for signs that Neanderthals interbred with humans—a idea he was “deeply suspicious” of at the time.

Read More