The “Bottleneck” that almost extinguished us.

Humanity has been on the verge of extinction on several occasions, but the highest point occurred between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, in 1998, the American anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose published a paper where he stated that, during that time, humanity, all humanity, was reduced to about 3,000 to 10,000 individuals who lived in family clans scattered between Africa and Asia. Humans had not reached Europe or America, for a time it was argued that the cause of this bottleneck was the eruption of the Toba super volcano in Indonesia that occurred some 74,000 years ago. It was the largest known explosive eruption on earth in over the past 25 million years, ejected thousands of cubic kilometers of material, blanketing the Indian subcontinent in a centimeter-long layer of ash, depositing a blanket of volcanic ash over the Indian Ocean and China Sea, and hurling shards of glass that reached as far as the East africa.

Experts believe that this eruption caused a severe volcanic winter for six to ten years and contributed to a cooling of global temperatures for another 1,000 years, however, the latest research rules out that this catastrophic eruption was the cause of the bottleneck in the human population, obviously there were bad times, but archaeological remains of the time have been found that show that humans could survive it. The issue is still under debate, although most experts support that this "bottleneck" was not due to the super volcano, but rather to the start of the last ice age. We might think that the glaciations mean a lot of cold in the lands of the North and South of the planet and that humans could, as a solution, emigrate to regions closer to the Equator and warmer

The above is true, the planet in general was colder but the equatorial temperatures were still pleasant, the problem is that in a colder land there is also more dryness, the water is frozen in gigantic ice caps, the rivers carry less flow and with less water and less rain we will have more deserts, less vegetation and therefore less food for everyone. It is quite possible that the onset of the ice age was a disaster for humans at the time and that it will take several thousand years for them to adapt and develop the technology for cold, although when they did around 50,000 years ago they broke out of the bottleneck and started the expansion and growth that led us to the present.

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