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Toba Super Volcano

2 May 2013
Catastrophism

At last the Toba super volcano catastrophe idea has been squelched – see www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22355515

The idea that humans almost became extinct at 75,000 years ago as a result of a super volcano was a useful tool eagerly seized on by the Out of Africa consensus as a means of creating, from the resultant bottlekneck, a pristine population of modern humans that then went on to colonise the whole globe. An Oxford University team has been looking at sediments in Lake Malawi, deep in Africa, for clues to the event – but corroborating information has been found lacking. Hence, even if Toba was a super volcano, a hypothesis (and don't forget all the hype about Thera not so long ago, where its signature in ice cores appears to be minimal to say the least) it could not have brought disaster on the world, or killed off over 90 per cent of the human population. For a well presented description of the Toba volcano theory one could not do better than read Trevor Palmer's account in Perilous Planet Earth, and basically the idea was that so much material was thrown up by the volcano it almost shut out sunlight and caused a problem to life on the surface of the Earth. The paper is published in PNAS this month and unfortunately for the consensus no evidence of massive global cooling was found, although some cooling was found somewhat earlier (reasons unspecified).

Note … the Toba signature is represented bya horizon with very small glass shards thought to have an origin in magma from a volcano. No doubt this will be questioned at some point in the future.

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