Volcanic Winter Catastrophe: The Toba Eruption and Human Bottleneck

The genetic diversity of the entire human race is startlingly narrow, suggesting that at some point in our distant past, our ancestors were nearly wiped from the face of the Earth. The culprit was not disease or war, but an apocalyptic geological event that plunged the globe into a devastating, decades-long freeze. Around 74,000 years ago, the Toba supervolcano in present-day Indonesia detonated...