
Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000 B.C - nl
http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c
======
contingencies
Today Toba[1] is huge volcanic lake with a central island, and a sort of
washed out station on the later hippy trail, but still physically interesting
to explore. For anyone considering a visit to Sumatra, do check out the nearby
taxidermy museum in Medan[2]. It's absolutely incredible. And for surfers,
don't miss the island of Nias[3], but fly instead of getting the boat in bad
weather, which amounts to a moving vomitorium. Southeast Sumatra has a huge
area of largely unexcavated stone ruins to rival Angkor [4] from an ancient,
regionally significant civilization and sea power, Srivijaya[5].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Toba)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medan)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nias)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angkor)

[5]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srivijaya](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srivijaya)

~~~
dEnigma
"Vomitorium" doesn't mean what you think it means.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomitorium)

Unless you were using it in a doubly jokey sense, while being aware of its
actual meaning.

~~~
Pixeleen
After building up a mental image of a vomitorium, that wiki page is a real
letdown.

------
grondilu
> But our looming weight makes us vulnerable, vulnerable to viruses that were
> once isolated deep in forests and mountains, but are now bumping into
> humans, vulnerable to climate change, vulnerable to armies fighting over
> scarce resources. The lesson of Toba the Supervolcano is that there is
> nothing inevitable about our domination of the world. With a little bad
> luck, we can go too.

I'm personally more inclined to think we are less vulnerable than ever before.

I doubt any virus would wipe out an entire population. An infectious agent
spreads better among a numerous population, but as it kills its hosts, the
population becomes smaller, which slows the infection rate. So there is
negative feedback here, and I doubt that can lead to a total extinction of the
host species. Not to mention that we have modern medicine now, and that we
understand how viruses work.

Climate change is an issue, but I have hard times imagining how it could wipe
out all human beings. Worse case scenario, I guess, would be a sharp decline
in agricultural production. So hunger riots and stuff. But even that would at
worse reduce the population until a new equilibrium is reached. And I don't
see that equilibrium to be at 0.

Nuclear war is a serious threat. But it's not like it would destroy the
surface of the Earth or anything. It would provoke a nuclear winter though. I
suppose a nuclear winter is about as bad as a volcanic winter is, or worse.
Again, the main difficulty would be a sharp decline in food production. And
that also would require a new population equilibrium to be reached.

IMHO human beings, nowadays, can deal with an awful lot of contingencies. We
can predict them, we can store resources, we can plan ahead...

There really is a case to make about the idea that humans will survive a mass
extinction. Annalee Newitz wrote a book about it[1]

1\. [https://www.amazon.com/Scatter-Adapt-Remember-Survive-
Extinc...](https://www.amazon.com/Scatter-Adapt-Remember-Survive-
Extinction/dp/0307949427)

~~~
vlehto
I'm also not afraid of isolated viruses in desolate places. They have limited
gene pool and no humans to practice with. It's incredibly unlikely that such
virus would randomly be very very good at targeting humans, but also very very
bad at staying super sneaky when on a human host.

The optimum strategy for virus is not to kill. It's to stay unnoticed and
spread. And the best way to stay unnoticed is not to cause any symptoms ever.

HIV is scary because it's not very good at staying unnoticed. But it's also
very bad at spreading too. Same goes with anthrax and pretty much every other
deadly virus/bacteria. They typically are optimized for other mammals and
therefore they suck at both staying unnoticed and targeting humans.

~~~
eru
HIV has actually gotten much better at co-existing with its human hosts over
the last few decades.

------
kobeya
Alternatively: "how human beings rose from the lesser hominids in 70,000
B.C.E."

There's a serious theory it was this bottleneck where humans were confined to
environments without natural preditors (seaside cliffs like those near Cape
Town) and where social interaction was a necessity. Those with higher
intelligence, particularly social intelligence, would scored more mates in
that environment. And thus we had a runaway intelligence arms race that
separated modern humans from their immediate hominid ancestors.

~~~
saalweachter
Note that humans and Neanderthals diverged 400,000 years ago, and when they
died out ~40,000 years ago, they were basically technologically and socially
indistinguishable from humans.

So I'm doubtful the secret sauce of humans had its origin 70,000 years ago.

~~~
kobeya
You ever met one? Had a conversation? Assessed it’s working memory, capacity
for abstract thoughts and manly layered thinking?

There is a lot we don’t know. The fact that Neanderthal buries their dead with
some sort of symbolism, cared for elders, and lived in (small!) groups doesn’t
really give us firm answers to these questions.

~~~
wallace_f
You are right that we don't know, but the user said indistinguishable, which
is true.

It is interesting that they actually had larger brains than modern humans, as
did the Cro Magnon homo sapiens we have also found).

~~~
animal531
Right, I've read the same. In practice they could very well have been more
intelligent than humans.

One interesting idea is that humans ultimately triumphed because we had better
social connections, we traveled much further and had much larger circles.

------
nostrademons
It's weird that the abstract of the first scholarly paper linked in this
article basically disproves the headline of the article. From the article:

"Because once in our history, the world-wide population of human beings
skidded so sharply we were down to roughly a thousand reproductive adults."

And from the abstract of the paper that that text links to:

"Both genetic and anthropological data are incompatible with the hypothesis of
a recent population size bottleneck. "

~~~
lokiboy
"The world-wide population of human beings skidded so sharply we were down to
roughly a thousand reproductive adults."

This is a completely mind blowing idea that humans were down to a count of
about 1000 adults. Look at us now at 7 billion, and we just can't stop warring
with our fellow relatives.

~~~
BurningFrog
A smaller percentage of the world population than ever is fighting or
suffering war these days than ever before.

~~~
coldtea
"These days" being the last few decades?

No sign that this is not just a temporary stop, in fact the opposite. There
were periods of relative peace in world history for longer than that.

In the last 100 years we had 2 world wars, 100s of millions killed, and tons
of peripheral wars during the "Cold War".

Besides for a lot of modern history wars didn't involve much of the citizenry
(they had mercenary armies). Now civilians are almost fair game. And where
they had arrows, spears and swords for most of history, we now have airforces
and atomic bombs.

~~~
mikeash
The world wars aren’t the top wars for percentage of living humans killed, and
may not even be the top in terms of absolute numbers of humans killed. For
example, the An Lushan Rebellion may have killed 10-15% of all humans alive at
the time.

~~~
coldtea
> _For example, the An Lushan Rebellion may have killed 10-15% of all humans
> alive at the time._

Those numbers are highly discredited.

Historians such as Charles Patrick Fitzgerald argue that a claim of 36 million
deaths is incompatible with contemporary accounts of the war. They point out
that the numbers recorded on the postwar registers reflect not only population
loss, but also a breakdown of the census system as well as the removal from
the census figures of various classes of untaxed persons, such as those in
religious orders, foreigners and merchants. For these reasons, census numbers
for the post-rebellion Tang are considered unreliable. Another consideration
is the fact that the territory controlled by Tang central authority was
diminished by the equivalent of several of the northern provinces, so that
something like a quarter of the surviving population were no longer within the
area subject to the imperial revenue system.

So, in all, even less that 5%...

~~~
mikeash
Even the low estimate is gigantic. The high estimate for WWII is something
like 3-4% of the world population.

~~~
coldtea
What's actually gigantic and not just perceived as such though, also changes
with the scale -- since we're talking about percentages.

If the earth had just 200 people, 20 of them killed is 10%, but it's nothing
that a small determined fight between two tribes can't easily achieve, without
even weapons.

Whereas the 3-4% of the 3 billion during WWII is a much bigger affair -- took
tons of bombs, battles, war-caused famines, an extermination program, and even
nuclear bombs...

~~~
mikeash
And despite all that, the proportion was lower and the absolute numbers at
least comparable. Deaths on an enormous scale, including lots and lots of
civilians, isn't anything new to the 20th century.

------
gumby
These bottlenecks are interesting.

The cheetah had an _extreme_ bottleneck — the remaining 20K or so cheetahs are
so genetically close that they can take each other.

I remember when this was figured out reading that the estimate was that they
had gone down below a hundred, a few kiloyears ago.

Here’s a brief article from back the (1987) about this:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/16/c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/16/cheetahs-
almost-died-out-long-ago/dfe8de44-af4e-4513-81c0-8f62743d8e5c/)

~~~
brianyu8
Very interesting, I had no idea that Cheetahs had such an insane bottleneck.
One question though, what do you mean by "they are so genetically close that
they can take each other"?

~~~
icegreentea2
Think gumby is talking about studies from the 80s which showed that captive
unrelated cheetahs can accept skin grafts from each other.

More detail (and later developments!) here:
[https://chickenoreggblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/cheetah-
ge...](https://chickenoreggblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/cheetah-genetic-
diversity-revisited/)

~~~
gumby
Yes, that was it

------
xefer
“Most demographers say we will hit 9 billion before we peak...”

I believe this thinking is very out of date at this point.

The 2017 UN Population Prospect report has the World population at 11.2
billion and still climbing by 2100. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa alone
is projection to be over 4.1 billion which I have to imagine will be nothing
short of a cataclysm if it actually gets to that. The data here is stunning:

[https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/](https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Graphs/)

~~~
mac01021
> 11.2 billion and still climbing by 2100.

They really don't think any physical constraints are going to get in the way
of that? There are only so many fish in the ocean.

~~~
ars
> They really don't think any physical constraints are going to get in the way
> of that?

With enough energy you are not constrained by resource limitations.

For example irrigate the desert with desalinated water.

It's a really big planet, you could fit a lot of people on it - and animals as
well.

It's all about energy.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Hmm, heard about the plummeting insect populations? Artificial pollination is
possible but costly, the more we grow and adopt land solely for human
populations; use pesticides to increase immediate crop yield; the more we
remove natural ecosystems that currently act with our food production cycles.

~~~
mythrwy
Grains aren't pollinated by insects though.

And domestic bees are brought in hives to many crops that are.

------
jchavannes
Wikipedia article on this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Geneti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory#Genetic_bottleneck_theory)

The Toba supereruption does correlate with a population decline, but evidence
beyond that isn't very conclusive.

------
kashkhan
cattle biomass is currently twice that of humans.

[http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/what-animal-collectively-
make...](http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa/what-animal-collectively-makes-
largest-biomass-earth-0)

~~~
dredmorbius
Humans alone out-mass all other pre-civilisation terrestrial vertabrates,
combined, by about 150%

Humans plus livestock are about 99% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass
presently.

This is aa new development

[https://i.redd.it/5h8e3j2tmftz.png](https://i.redd.it/5h8e3j2tmftz.png)

[http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...](http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg)

------
saladeen
While everyone is focusing on the bottlenecks and such that this might have
caused in homo sapiens, the main thing for me is the relation between Toba
catastrophe and the main human migration out of Africa, which came 60kya. My
theory is that Toba killed off or severely weakened populations of other human
species (Neanderthals primarily) that were claiming the areas in Middle East
and thus blocking our expansion.

So instead of (or along with) having being a major threat for us, I think it's
what enabled us to become the global species we are today.

------
jcranmer
The thing about the Toba catastrophe theory is that the best evidence for it
is "there was a massive eruption ~73K years ago" (the largest in the past
several hundred thousand years). Which is to say, there is no archaeological
evidence of depopulation. I don't know the genetic evidence well enough, but
Wikipedia's presentation of that evidence is non-sensical, and I don't think
there is unambiguous genetic evidence that "humans were relatively inbred
~70kya."

------
teekno
Maybe that was our great filter [1] and we’re off to Type III civilization?

[1] [https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-
paradox.html](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)

~~~
rf15
Signs point to a long chain of great filters, as far as I can see: \-
DNA/cellular Life itself: each is already highly improbable and hard to
reproduce, and likely not even possible anymore in our current
climate/atmosphere \- multicellular life is a lot more likely past step one,
but still hard \- life that is maintainable and powerful enough to escape the
struggle for survival long enough to bother with something like complex social
structures and engineering (super unlikely because the more powerful you get,
the easier it is for you to accidentally destroy all your food sources and
starve to death until the system is balanced again)

~~~
mikeash
My pet theory (completely unsubstantiated, of course) is that intelligent life
is common but that it rarely develops money. Stuck with barter, most
intelligent life never moves beyond low levels of trade and technology.

The concept of assigning value to largely useless objects and using them to
keep score is extremely powerful, but also highly weird.

~~~
kerbalspacepro
Have you read Debt: The First 5, 000 Years by David Graeber? While a lot of it
is kind of... socialisty, it does a good job at describing how the standard
"barter--> money" econ history is anthropologically wrong.

~~~
mikeash
I haven't, although I've seen it discussed before. I just grabbed a sample of
the eBook so I can check it out. Thanks for the mention!

------
varjag
The 40 couples left must been really celebrating the narrow escape in 69,999
BC.

~~~
dharma1
Party like it's 69,999

------
Abishek_Muthian
'Perhaps' this was the trigger for the end of other homo species and the
location of certain group of Homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) helped them
survive the consequences of Toba?

------
EGreg
Does anyone see parallels between the flood stories and Toba?

~~~
Quarrelsome
Toba is possibly more fire and brimstone and hell on earth. Think about it,
the sun would be blotted out, famine, war, destruction, ash everywhere. Its
possibly the root source of our depictions of hell. I think the flood is more
likely to be related to our exit of the ice age and the resulting catastrophic
flooding from the ice melt.

All speculative of course but its fun to speculate.

~~~
arethuza
There were also events like Storegga Slide that caused a tsunami in the North
Sea - it might have inundated Doggerland.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide)

------
c517402
xkcd of land mammal biomass

[https://xkcd.com/1338/](https://xkcd.com/1338/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Human biomass growth 1900 - 2015: [http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...](http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg)

------
jtth
Funny how that's around the time of the supposed cognitive revolution.

------
CodeSheikh
It is appalling to think most of us could be descendants of those 40 something
odd pairs of survived Homo Sapiens.

------
jaequery
does this mean the days of Noah actually did exist?

~~~
dredmorbius
If so, almost certainly _not_ this eveent.

