Arguments against the significance of the Toba super-eruption for abrupt, catastrophic climate change and population reduction, have provided the opportunity for a detailed reexamination and restatement of the main points of the hypothesis of Toba’s relationship to the human population bottleneck, and to cultural developments. In summary: The eruption was significantly larger than previously estimated, and caused a millennium of the coldest temperatures of the Upper Pleistocene. The population bottleneck was real rather than “putative”, and it occurred during the first half of the last glacial period. Mass extinctions were not a feature of this event. Capacities for modern human behavior were undoubtedly present during the last interglacial, but the … Continue reading Stanley H. Ambrose