The Toba Supereruption: A Natural Disaster That Nearly Wiped Out Humanity
Around 70,000 years ago, humanity faced one of the greatest challenges in its evolutionary history. A colossal natural disaster, known as the Toba supereruption, shook the Earth and nearly drove the Homo sapiens species to extinction. What Is a Population Bottleneck? In evolutionary biology, a population bottleneck is an event in which the number of individuals in a species is drastically reduced in a short time. As a result, genetic variation narrows significantly. That’s exactly what happened to our ancestors. It is estimated that only about 3,000 to 10,000 Homo sapiens individuals survived this catastrophic event. The Toba Eruption: A Prehistoric Nightmare Mount Toba, located in Sumatra, erupted with an estimated force of more than 2,800 km³ of volcanic material. For comparison, the 1815 eruption of Tambora—which caused the "year without a summer"—released only about 160 km³. The Toba eruption triggered a global "volcanic winter": Global temperatures plummeted. S...