SuperVolcanoes, Evolution and You!
Last night I watched yet another cable TV doco on supervolcanoes – this one focused on the Toba eruption 70,000 years ago. I didn’t learn anything new, but a new thought crossed my mind:
Could global catastrophes be the secret ingredient that made us who we are?
According to the documentary, all humans at the time were in Africa, and of the 1 million alive prior to the super-eruption, only 30,000 survived the volcanic winter. According to Wikipedia:
This change in temperature resulted in the world’s human population being reduced to 10,000 or even a mere 1,000 breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution.
This theory has a lot of solid scientific support. And it got me thinking… surely prior super-eruptions from other supervolcanoes caused similar bottlenecks? In that case you could argue that these and other cataclysms (local and global) are key ingredients and drivers of human evolution.
Planet Earth is sometimes referred to as being a Goldilocks Planet – because our location in the solar system, and our atmosphere and tidal forces and seasons all make for a rare place for intelligent life to flourish. I’m suggesting that we add in the factor of catastrophes. And not just any old catastrophe. We seem to have catastrophes that aren’t big enough to wipe us out, and not so small that we easily survive them. We have global cataclysms that are just right, that almost wipe us out and drive evolution.
Now, according to genetics we are all descended from those who were in Africa when Toba last erupted. Yet there is evidence for prior human distribution outside of Africa. These seem to be at odds with each other, but they can both be true if there were other humans that we are not descended from. If they left Africa much earlier than our ancestors, they may have evolved separately from us, into quite a different race or even species. The Toba eruption could have been behind the evolution of the Mysterious Elders as much as it was for us.
When the next global cataclysm occurs, there may only be a small percentage of society that survives. According to the Mega-Disasters documentary, to survive a super-eruption you would need a bunker and 10-years-worth of food and water. And if that was you, you could be part of what makes the next evolution of humans tick.
