The Toba eruption leans heavily toward the 'interesting thought experiment' category as well at this point though. I'm in a paleoclimatology class right now an

The Toba eruption leans heavily toward the 'interesting thought experiment' category as well at this point though. I'm in a paleoclimatology class right now and we spent a couple weeks on it. The John Hawks post[0] cited under #Criticism on Wikipedia is a pretty good summary of the current research as I understand it. The short argument against it is that the genetic signature corresponds to either an extremely tight short bottleneck, ie all living humans are descended from a group of <1000 which lived through Toba, or a looser bottleneck (tens of thousands of humans) which lasted centuries. The tight bottleneck version requires almost all of Earth to have become briefly uninhabitable which strains belief since we've found several sites which were a-ok throughout, and the loose version is unworkable because Toba didn't have centuries long effects. http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/climate/toba-bottleneck-didnt-happen-2018.html http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/climate/toba-bottleneck-...