When humanity came close to the end of the world

74,000 years ago, mankind was on the brink of extinction. The cause was the explosion of a volcano. Genetic studies confirm that the human population numbered only a few thousand individuals at that time. Today, the threat of mass extinction remains.

In 1993, two American vulcanologists, Michael Rampino and Stephen Self, published an article in the journal Science, in which they hypothesized that the eruption of Mount Toba, in Sumatra, Indonesia, some 74,000 years ago, could have wiped out humanity: ’Toba was the largest explosive eruption of the last 100,000 years and may have been linked to a bottleneck in the human population.« This thesis has been confirmed by other researchers. Anthropologist Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois wrote in the Journal of Human Evolution five years later: »The winter v