What is Toba Catastrophe Theory?
Toba Catastrophe Theory is the idea that a population bottleneck in humanity’s past, which is inferred from gene analysis, was caused by a supervolcano eruption 75,000 years ago on Lake Toba is what is now Indonesia. The Toba Catastrophe Theory was first proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to gene analysis, human genetic diversity is actually quite low in comparison to similar species, and all humans alive today are descended from a population of 1,000 – 10,000 breeding pairs that lived 50,000 – 150,000 years before the present. This is called a population bottleneck. The Toba Catastrophe Theory is supported by geologic evidence (ice cores from Greenland) that show a substantial change in global climate around the time. Gene analysis of human hair lice even supports the idea. Anecdotal evidence from 1816, the so-called “Year Without a Winter” — caused by the colossal eruption of Mt. Tambora, also in Indonesia — shows that
