Comments on: Environmental Impact of the 73 ka Toba Super-eruption in South Asia – ScienceDirect

By: onyx

onyx — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 03:34:43 +0000

really huge disasters (like meteors) are only survived by small (scavenging) animals. conclusion, not much the matter, if anything was the matter they could scavenge with ease, otherways they would move to the more reliable foodsourced areas. only if a very major part of the animals died out(we do with some 10% of what was there as game 100k years ago) they would have had a serious problem, there is no evidence i know of for such an extinction event due to the toba explosion. ofcourse it is attractive to deduce a cultural change of the patterns, that may at many times in human development have been prohibitive to innovation, for now i think that farfetched and indeed anthropocentric, i am far from convinced older humans were much lacking in diversified behaviour or less flexible then we.

By: Marcel F. Williams

Marcel F. Williams — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:19:09 +0000

This is just dumb anthropocentric thinking to relate the bottle-neck in human evolution to the Toba eruption!

If Toba caused a world wide human bottle-neck, why didn’t it cause similar bottle-necks in the orangutan, chimpanzee, and gorilla populations?

By: terryt

terryt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 22:51:50 +0000

Able to spread more widely with the ones they already had would be my guess.

By: dearieme

dearieme — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:11:10 +0000

Or this disaster may have forced the ancestors of modern humans to adopt new competitive strategies for survival. Who knows?

By: terryt

terryt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:27:28 +0000

“That last sentence regarding Neanderthal extinction seems to me to be stretching a point, especially when we bear in mind that Neanderthals survived Mount Toba by around 50,000 years, and there is nothing specific in the archaeological record that points to sudden innovations by AMH at this time”.

And that’s the problem for those who like to believe it was nearly the end of the world. In fact the comment in the abstract:

“Pollen evidence shows that the eruption was followed by initial cooling and prolonged desiccation, reflected in a decline in tree cover in India and the adjacent region. Carbon isotopes show that C3 forest was replaced by wooded to open C4 grassland in central India”

suggests humans would have been better off. After all grassland seems to be more humans’ natural habitat than is dense forest. So it was aliitle colder in India. I would have thought that was a relief.