When Humans Nearly Vanished, Donald R. Prothero
When Humans Nearly Vanished, Donald R. Prothero
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When Humans Nearly Vanished
The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano

Author: Donald R. Prothero

Narrator: Qarie Marshall

Unabridged: 6 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/19/2018

Synopsis

Some 73,000 years ago, the Mount Toba supervolcano in todays 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 suns 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.

About Donald R. Prothero

Donald R. Prothero is a research associate in vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. He has taught college geology and paleontology for forty years at institutions such as Columbia University, Vassar College, Knox College, and Pierce College, and currently at Cal Poly Pomona. For twenty-seven years, he was professor of geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles and lecturer in geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He earned his MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees in geological sciences from Columbia University. He is the author of over 300 scientific papers published in leading journals and over thirty titles in geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Marty on May 06, 2019

Enjoyed the premise of this book and the discussion of how all the relevant pieces were established, such as the DNA bottleneck and its age, the size and estimated effects of huge, prehistoric volcanoes, etc. However... It seemed to me that a number of the modern numbers he quoted for comparisons wer......more

Goodreads review by Matthew on August 19, 2020

The book basically takes a very long way of explaining that “70000 years ago human beings were almost wiped out and this is exactly why we know. And also this is why we know what that means, and the history of how we found out what that means.” Interesting, but a lot of the background felt really un......more

Goodreads review by Beauregard on March 06, 2023

A perfect science book that shows how we think we know about an extinction event while fitting it into our current web of knowledge. No narrative about facts ever stands alone and science is the best narrative that we currently have to explain the web of facts and science theories need context, rela......more

Goodreads review by Keith on January 11, 2020

I guess this is a classic case of the book not living up to the title. I checked out this book to read about the Toba eruption and the postulated genetic bottleneck in the human experience whereby all living humans trace their lineage back to a small group that existed some 70,000 years ago. Great.......more

Goodreads review by Dan on January 06, 2020

Probably more a 3.5 than a 4.... Overall, decent and easy to read until he gets to rattling off hominin species. Then there’s a huge mess which even the diagrams don’t help. To be sure, human evolution is messy and keeps getting revised. But more diagrams and trimming down that part of the story wou......more

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