Lake Toba
<p>Mar 22, 2009 10:58 PM
 
75,000 years ago....
 
massive die-off
 
largest volcanic explosion in the past 2.5 MY.
 
Very few plants or animals in southeast Asia would have survived, and it is possible that the eruption caused a planet-wide die-off. There is some evidence, based on <a title="Mitochondrial DNA" href="/wiki/Mitochondrial_DNA">mitochondrial DNA</a>, that the human race may have passed through a <a class="mw-redirect" title="Genetic bottleneck" href="/wiki/Genetic_bottleneck">genetic bottleneck</a> within this timeframe, reducing genetic diversity below what would be expected from the age of the species. According to the <a title="Toba catastrophe theory" href="/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory">Toba catastrophe theory</a> proposed by Stanley H. Ambrose of the <a title="University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign" href="/wiki/University_of_Illinois_at_Urbana-Champaign">University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign</a> in 1998, human populations may have been reduced to only a<b> few tens of thousands of individuals by the Toba eruption</b>
 
Genetic evidence suggests that all humans alive today, despite their apparent variety, are descended from a very small population, perhaps between 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs about 70,000 years ago  (from Toba Catastrophe Theory)</p>