Investigations & syntheses

Features

Long-form, documented and sourced articles connecting discoveries and telling the great transformations of humankind.

Middle Palaeolithic

Middle Palaeolithic

The Toba supereruption and the human bottleneck

About 74,000 years ago, on the island of Sumatra, the Toba volcano produced the largest eruption of the past two million years, nearly 2,800 km³ of magma, a 100-km-long caldera, an ash cloud reaching India. Did this catastrophe nearly wipe out humanity? The story of a spectacular theory, and of its undoing.

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