When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano
Written by Donald R. Prothero
Narrated by Qarie Marshall
5/5
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About this audiobook
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 audiobook, 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.
Donald R. Prothero
Donald R. Prothero specializes in physics, planetary sciences, astronomy, earth sciences, and vertebrate paleontology. He has taught for more than thirty years at the college level, including at Columbia, Knox, Pierce, Vassar, and the California Institute of Technology. He has authored or edited more than three hundred scientific papers and thirty books, including Giants of the Lost World: Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Monsters of South America.
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Reviews for When Humans Nearly Vanished
14 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a very good geology book, a very concise History of the Scientific Method review, a thin paleo anthropology review.
But to claim this title, the author could have linked all germane discussions and made his point in a book review.
It is also starting to grate, more with each successive audiobook, when the author doesn’t seem to have cared about the credibility of their book, enough to listen to its oral presentation. The uncountable mispronunciations each detracts from the respect I can retain for the production.