hmm.. i think this news had been out quite long ago.. but i still find it interesting.
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308_super_volcano.html
'The next super eruption, whenever it occurs, might not be the first one humans have dealt with.
About 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba blew with a force estimated at 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens. Ash darkened the sky all around the planet. Temperatures plummeted by up to 21 degrees at higher latitudes, according to research by Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.
Rampino has estimated three-quarters of the plant species in the Northern Hemisphere perished.
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints of life for all humans -- DNA -- are remarkably similar given that our species branched off from the rest of the primate family tree a few million years ago.
Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption -- around the same time folks got serious about art and tool making. Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years.'
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WOW... a few thousand survived! we came from those few thousand!!! so we are all one big family!!!
sad to say, 'family' members still kill each other ah... reference to wars and those dumb terriorists. =.="
guess i am going to spend my time looking through those geography stuffs once again.
aww.. i am so loving my pure geog. HEH!
http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308_super_volcano.html
'The next super eruption, whenever it occurs, might not be the first one humans have dealt with.
About 74,000 years ago, in what is now Sumatra, a volcano called Toba blew with a force estimated at 10,000 times that of Mount St. Helens. Ash darkened the sky all around the planet. Temperatures plummeted by up to 21 degrees at higher latitudes, according to research by Michael Rampino, a biologist and geologist at New York University.
Rampino has estimated three-quarters of the plant species in the Northern Hemisphere perished.
Stanley Ambrose, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, suggested in 1998 that Rampino's work might explain a curious bottleneck in human evolution: The blueprints of life for all humans -- DNA -- are remarkably similar given that our species branched off from the rest of the primate family tree a few million years ago.
Ambrose has said early humans were perhaps pushed to the edge of extinction after the Toba eruption -- around the same time folks got serious about art and tool making. Perhaps only a few thousand survived. Humans today would all be descended from these few, and in terms of the genetic code, not a whole lot would change in 74,000 years.'
---
WOW... a few thousand survived! we came from those few thousand!!! so we are all one big family!!!
sad to say, 'family' members still kill each other ah... reference to wars and those dumb terriorists. =.="
guess i am going to spend my time looking through those geography stuffs once again.
aww.. i am so loving my pure geog. HEH!
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