Hi All. Petra got me to thinking about something I read not to long ago about a bottleneck in the human race. It was about the super volcano Toba.

I also remember reading about the same thing occurring about 12,000 years ago and that this bottleneck may have been caused by the ice age. Haven’t been able to find any data for that at this time. Take Care…Don in creepy town

“Geneticists have been studying and decoding human DNA for some time. Some have specialised in the study of mitochondrial DNA, from which mutations passed on only by females to their offspring can be identified. The frequency, or intervals, at which these mutations occur are known to be regular. Given the size of the human population and the amount of time we are supposed to have lived on this planet, the genetic diversity should have been great. Geneticists were therefore baffled that in fact the reverse was true. We are all genetically very similar to each other, and this should not have been the case.

This could only mean one thing. Based on the mtDNA evidence, scientists have determined that we are all descended from a very small population of between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals. In effect, a population bottleneck. Calculating the number of mutations enabled geneticists to estimate when this bottleneck occurred. And the results, when the information was passed to the Vulcanologists, sent a shiver up their spines. It was around 74,000 years ago, the same time as the super volcano eruption at Toba in Indonesia.”

• Super Volcanoes