When Humans Nearly Vanished

The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano

By: Donald R. Prothero

Narrated by: Qarie Marshall

Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in toda's Indonesia erupted, releasing the energy of a million tons of explosives. So much ash and debris was injected into the stratosphere that it partially blocked the sun's radiation and caused global temperatures to drop for a decade.

In this book, Donald R. Prothero presents the controversial argument that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race, leaving only about a thousand to ten thousand breeding pairs of humans worldwide. Human genes today show evidence of a "genetic bottleneck", an effect seen when a population of organisms becomes so small that their genetic diversity is greatly reduced. This group of survivors could be the ancestors of all humans alive today.

Prothero explores the geological and biological evidence supporting the Toba bottleneck theory, revealing how the explosion itself was discovered and offering insight into how the world changed afterward and what might happen if such an eruption occurred today.

©2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC

excellent

thank you for putting all of this info together into this book. there is a ton of great info that all humans need to know about. more people need to know about this stuff in order to be better humans.

Generally disappointed

I don’t know. This was mostly a collection things like the differences among the hominids, different extinction events,; less focus on the Tobu event than I expected. Could becreduced to a three-episode podcast. Learned stuff though.

Mountains of information, none about the subject

This book has done the impossible, it has made super volcano
and mass extinctions boring. Even worse, after slogging through the pages and pages of scientific fluff, you are still not giving a concrete answer or even theory. Right around chapter three somewhere, when I was slogging through X-ray crystallography, molecular structures of DNA, and how Dr. Rosalind Franklin was robbed by the patriarchy, I was starting to think that perhaps he just put a volcano on the cover of the book to sex it up a little. I am now much more intimate with the archeological finds of homo erectus than I ever wanted to be while reading about a volcano.

I almost quit

Throughout the book especially early on, the use of both Imperial and metric numbers was very annoying. This is unnecessary for the intended audience and is very distracting from the information being presented.

Outstanding presentation!

A precise, organized presentation of what could have been confusing information- brings several areas of expertise together to account for a very probable human genetic bottleneck approximately 70 million years ago, and ends with an uplifting and mind-broadening perspective on disasters and the human species. Narration was great!

Excellent explanation

This is a comprehensive look at the cause of the extreme reduction in the human population, dated only about 74,000 years ago. The author is a good story teller as well as a good scientist! Loved this book!

Not what I expected, even better.

The title is a bit misleading. The story in the first few chapters sets the stage for Toba, by comparing it to other more recent volcanic events. The history puts Toba at around 74,000 years ago, a time when human populations were diverging and possibly at a bottleneck to spreading across the planet. This event may or may not have been caused by the Toba eruptions. I found that the audio looks more deeply into this bottleneck by thoroughly examining our DNA based on the most accurate evidence as of the books writing. This process dives deeply into anthropologic sciences to help promote the decrease in human population growth. You will learn about families like the louis Leakey, his wife and son, and their contributions to the development of our history to our species. Stay with the entire audio, don't give up on it when it takes you away from the title, into the unfamiliar divergence of anthropology. It is a very interesting history lesson through out of Africa, through Europe and Asia, and finally across the Beringia to the America's. The author after the majority of the chapters does return to the original title at the end and how Toba and the possibility of a catastrophic volcanic explosion could have created a 'nuclear winter event blocking the sun for multiple years and resulting in the human evolutionary bottleneck. I enjoyed the audio and actually checked out the hardcopy for the photographic evidence and maps. The most interesting portion I found was the geographical evidence presented from multiple sources, such as the deep ice cores from Greenland and cores from the bottom of the ocean. Alot of Earth's past history can extracted by searching the bottom of the sea, it is through geological evidence. By researching the author, Donald R. Prothero has taught paleontology, geology, oceanography, meteorology and climate science. He is also an excellent writer being able to explain through his research in a very understandable way. The narrator Qarie Marshall presents all the topics and engages the listener from the beginning to the end without losing the listener. Overall, this title is not what the majority of the audio or book is about. The title is what caught my attention, so it did it's job, but in a roundabout way. Not what I expected, even better.

A very special book

I’ve never read a book that was almost entirely filler but more than 95 percent of the book has nothing to do with the Toba eruption. On the other hand, if you are seeking lengthy discussions of barely relevant or completely irrelevant topics like the extinction of the dinosaurs and the personal rivalries among the scientists who discovered DNA, then this book is for you.