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In the meantime, we can forget about the cataclysmic effect of Toba on the poor hominids.
Don't they realise how stupid they look when somebody pulls the rug out from under?
Seventy-four-thousand years ago, Indonesia’s Mount Toba erupted, spreading ash from the Arabian Sea to the South China Sea. Using data from ice cores, researchers have concluded this eruption — Earth’s largest in the past 2 million years — drastically altered the world’s climate and caused a six-year-long volcanic winter in some parts of the world. Correlating the date of the eruption to evidence of a genetic bottleneck in the modern human population around the same time, some researchers suggested that populations of modern humans (Homo sapiens) that had previously expanded out of Africa were unable to cope with these changes, and thus experienced huge population declines everywhere except in tropical, mainly African, refuges. Now, Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, says his team has found evidence to the contrary. Excavating in Jwalapuram in southeastern India, Petraglia and his crew discovered stone tools that they say show not only that modern humans were living in the area both before and shortly after the eruption, but that they left Africa via a different route than is commonly thought.
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