Alive! We survived a post Toba winter

摘要

No ark required. Animals survived the flood of lava that erupted from the Toba supervolcano about 74,000 years ago just fine on their own, a new genetic analysis shows. The finding casts doubt on the theory that humans were almost wiped out around that time by a "volcanic winter" - an idea that comes from genetic data showing that the population rapidly expanded Just after that time, as if it had recently collapsed. If Toba caused such a collapse, humans would not have been the only ones affected, reasoned Geoffrey Hayes of Northwestern University in Chicago. His team examined the DNA of 19 mammal species from every continent looking for a similar genetic pattern. It showed up in seven of them, but only coincided with Toba in two - the Siberian roe deer and Chinese black snub-nosed monkey.