'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Toba, Toba, Toba

Toba is a likely super volcanic event that would have taken place on Lake Toba, Sumatra some 70,000 to 75,000 years ago. It has crucial significance on a number of issues. Assuming that Toba happened – and something major certainly happened given Toba ash deposits 6 metres thick deposited 3,000 km away in central India - it would have major impact on our thinking regarding climate change and on the historical expansion of Homo sapiens around the world.

The last such super volcanic event before Toba looks like having been about 640,000 years ago in Yellowstone but you have to go back 2.1 million years for the biggest Yellowstone eruption and that itself would not have been as large as this much more recent Toba event (Toba 70-75,000 years ago -3,000 times the size of 1980 St Helens eruption, Yellowstone 2.1 million years ago – 2,500 times the size). It is also important to bear in mind that only the Toba event would have happened when Homo sapiens was actually there to catch it on the chin, as we have only been around for 200,000 years.

Looking at this information from a climate change perspective, this is easiest to grasp with the help of the following data:

• OIS5: Oxygen Isotope Stage 5: hot and humid (from 130,000 to 73,000 years ago)
• OIS4: Oxygen Isotope Stage 4: cold and dry (from 73,000 to 63,000 years ago), in fact the coldest OIS for the past 110,000 years
• OIS3: Oxygen Isotope Stage 3: warm but not quite as warm or humid as OIS5 (63,000 to 45,000 years ago)

In other words, there was a ten thousand year blip when the earth’s climate became cold and dry, starting at the time that the Toba event is predicted to have happened. As little time ago as 12,000 years the earth saw the end of a far shorter lived Ice Age and even in the 1600’s did we see a mini ice age, all of which goes to show that with or without carbon emissions the earths climate is constantly changing, often promoted by some natural, cataclysmic event.

The conclusion must be that with or without carbon emissions, we are going to get clobbered BIG TIME, but not necessarily in the next few hundred years, and the Global Warming scenario would seem like a flea bite to what the earth has experienced in the recent past, geologically speaking. The fact that any change in the climate must be taken so seriously is that we have overpopulated the Planet to such a major extent that like it or not, we are cruisin’ for a bruisin’. All the clean, renewable energy in the world won’t alter that.

Where this information connects with our knowledge of our own evolution is in what’s called the ‘Toba bottleneck’. That is how the Toba event caused all living species including our own to suffer a major, if not fatal decrease in its numbers. This has been suggested as the reason that our gene pool is so limited for a 200,000 year old species as in fact we had to do it all over again in the last 75,000 years, given the fact that we only broke out of Africa some 150,000 years ago.

Apparantly, Greenland ice cores show that the Toba event was followed by 6 years of volcanic winter. To account for Homo sapiens present genetic uniformity it has been estimated that a minimum of 40 to 600 females came through that bottleneck. The highest estimate so far has 10,000 females of reproductive age as the minimum. This highest estimate would be talking about the entire human race numbering no more than the population of one small country town today. There has been some evidence to suggest that over the 20,000 years following Toba the entire human population was never more than a few thousand at any one time. My thinking is that the cold spell following Toba lasted for ten thousand years so probably we were pined back for 10,000 years, not the 20,000 years suggested.

This entirely changes the concept of a slow but steady expansion around the world following the break out of Africa some 150,000 years ago. Instead we have the break out of Africa, followed 75,000 years later by an event that brought humanity to its knees with the real human expansion around the world being achieved not over 150,000 years, but over something more like the last 55,000/ 65,000 years.
I am sorry that this article reads like a page from a school book, but I have felt impelled to write it precisely because it isn’t.

If we don’t get a grip on what this planet can do on its own accord without any help from us, and of our own true history, then what chance is there but for a further dose of many thousands of years of primeval life for the few very unlucky survivors? We may have a few hundred years to get ourselves set up for this or we may not, but with the knee jerk responses currently going the rounds and the lack of concentration on these basic facts, the writing is on the wall.

 

   

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