It is official: Toba did NOT bottleneck the human species. We already had an inkling of this in Africa proper; no disruption there. The remaining questions were about Out Of Africa, genetically estimated around that time. Was OOA before the eruption, after, or both?
What's new here is that Toba's date has been agreed upon, and that there are Stone Age camps in India from before and after the eruption. The style of camp and technology persisted across the divide.
Peter Watson's The Great Divide argued that humans already out of Africa remembered the Toba blackout - meaning, they survived it. Score one for him.
No comments:
Post a Comment