IMG source - Pinterest.it - Mt. Pinatubo
In the fossil record of the Earth we find occasional events that have wrought immense destruction, death, and undoubtedly despair. Survivors of such events no doubt suffered great anguish at the inclement conditions in the wake of such events, at the destruction of their nations, cultures, and people, of their homes, homelands, and habitat, for such cataclysms do all those things and reduce survivors to the necessity of expedience to continue to live thereafter.
The eruption of Mt. Toba ~73kya left S. Asia buried under a blanket of volcanic ash ~6M deep, from Indonesia where the eruption occurred (Mt. Pinatubo, pictured above, wasn't too far off in the Philippines, from where Toba popped), to the Levant, sparing nothing alive it's suffocating embrace, and leaving any living in that region only one option to continue to live: flight. While calculations of the rate of molecular mutations supported the hypothesis that at about that time our species first departed Africa, the proposition of leaving that refuge from the obliteration of the habitable environment for the very wasteland of ash seems highly unlikely. Further, the Out of Africa theory, as it has come to be known, proposes that H. sapiens evolved in Africa and fossil evidence of progressively modern Sapiens remains is held up as support of that hypothesis, from the archaic proto sapiens found in Djebel Irhoud in Morocco that have been dated to ~300kya, to more derived modern remains scattered across E. and S. Africa from ~200kya to ~130kya, the OoA hypothesis has become consensus in the field of human evolution.
IMG source - Donsmaps.com - Djebel Irhoud skull
IMG source - HakaiMagazine.com
However, since aDNA has been extracted from hominin remains outside of Africa that are shown to be of the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens - and never lived or are found in Africa - it has since been disproved that H. sapiens evolved in Africa. It is patently obvious that when you were born, you were born where your parents were. You could not have been born on another continent from where you mother gave birth to you. Neither could Homo sapiens have been born on a different continent than it's progenitors ranged.
The horrific destruction across Asia that left it's southern tropical margin uninhabitable belies the supposition that people would have left the verdant climes of Africa ~75kya for the lifeless wastes on it's doorstep. Apocalypses leave their marks and reveal truth that might have otherwise never become understood. Even so, even with proof in hand of such truth, majorities remain unaware, unbelieving, and unconvinced even of evidence like the DNA of humanity.
Ancient DNA has proved that Homo sapiens diverged from Homo neanderthalensis. The chain of genetic heritage is probative. As Neanderthals were strictly a Eurasian species, whose range extended from Iberia to Siberia, that divergence from Neanderthals that produced Sapiens could only have occurred somewhere across that range.
If humanity fled habitat destroyed by the Toba eruption to the closest habitable range, they would have fled that catastrophe into Africa just as the OoA researchers show variation in mtDNA suddenly appeared in humanity, according to their calculations, and thereafter spread across the world when Sapiens expanded, leaving a progressive chain of mutations producing the legacy of mtDNA extant in our species today.
Certainly any people unable to make it to Africa, and unable to survive more northerly climes less affected by the smothering ash, unable to live in the ocean that lay to the south, were unable to live at all, and perished from the terrible conditions that did not provide them the necessities of life. Remains of archaic people have been found beyond the ash in China that show derived features retained today in modern people dating to times long prior to the eruption of Toba or supposed expansion of humanity out of Africa. Clearly some people survived Toba, and the colder climate, north of the tropical beaches of S. Asia.
What is clear is that we alive today are vastly different people than lived then. That destruction and horrific genocide of humanity Toba caused eliminated many people that perished. The cataclysm transformed humanity, leaving only the survivors to pass on their genes to their sons and daughters, that eventually left them to us.
Today we face multiple catastrophes. War spreading from the Middle East to Northern Europe. Pestilential pathogens that seem to have been made for the purpose of killing millions of people. Now new policies that are eliminating our ability to provide the necessities of life, eradicating the most productive farms in the world, the most inexpensive and reliable fuels that enable travel and industry, to even censoring our speech, preventing us from discussing and understanding these ongoing cataclysms killing so many of us today, and threatening far more dire genocides to come.
We are told by those that appear to be effecting those policies that we cannot expect to return to the conditions that enabled our lives to be maintained, and it seems likely they are right. Not prophetic, because they are doing these things to us, not predicting natural events over which they have no control, but perpetrating crimes and genocide to increase their wealth and power over our dead bodies. Whatever follows the incipient catastrophes, there will almost certainly be similar changes to humanity that survive them to those that affected our forebears that survived the cataclysms in prehistory.
Who survive will be smarter, harder working, quicker on their feet, than those that do not. Whatever the specific existential hazards that arise, and whatever their derivation, it is those that best are informed they are happening, best understand how to survive them, and are capable and willing to do so that will live on after they have happened.
Be smart. Work hard. Be fast on your feet, and understand what is happening so you can leave humanity a legacy of your posterity after the coming apocalypse. We will be a better humanity for it, for your perspicacity and industry that enables your posterity to live when many will die.
For that, I thank you.
