Re: Humans in Skunkworks/Caterwaul
--- In SkunkworksAMA_at_yahoogroups.com, <peter10@...> wrote:
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> are you also aware of the population bottleneck in evolution, which they found out about a few years ago? Apparently something for the time of proper recorded history reduced the world's population of humans as well as a lot of other life forms dramatically! They figure the world's population was reduced to around 1500 or so people and all the people in the world are a descendent of this small global Mass of surviving humans. Kind of trippy to realize they don't even know what wiped out all those people and life in general. Sort of like a secondary extinction event like wiping out dinosaurs but sometime later.
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> > > Edward Fox
That bottleneck was caused by the Toba Eruption, a supervolcano that erupted between seventy and seventy-five thousand years ago on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia.
If current vocanic eruptions could be compared to a stick of dynamite, then a supervolcano is a hydroden bomb. It threw volcanic ash for hundreds of miles around, killing every living thing within that range. It spewed billions of tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere that spread around the globe and cooled the temperature, triggering the last Ice Age. Photosynthesis failed and ultimately resulted in the starvation of millions of humans who were scattered across Africa and southern Asia.
By the time Earth recovered so that our ancestors could start recovering, there were anywhere between ten thousand to one thousand breeding pairs of survivors. All of which were in eastern Africa. And like I had mentioned, it wiped out Homo Erectus (and most of the Neanderthal).
That truly is something to think about though. You, me, absolutely every other member of Homo Sapiens that have ever lived over those past tens of thousands of years, and even those yet to be born, are descended from just a few thousand Africans!
I bet the Earth in the Skunkworksama Universe never experienced something like that or else there would have been a lot less diverse species of sapient beings.
-Brandon Payne
Received on Wed Oct 10 2012 - 11:15:22 CDT
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