Doomsday Clock Holds at 5 'Til Midnight

[pscot]

10. Often wrong, but never in doubt...

The Toba theory is a speculative attempt to explain wht the genetic record seems to show. Here's Wikipedia which summarizes other, more technical sources:

Research on many genes finds different coalescence points from 2 million years ago to 60,000 years ago when different genes are considered, thus disproving the existence of more recent extreme bottlenecks (i.e., a single breeding pair).[3][6]

On the other hand, in 2000, a Molecular Biology and Evolution paper suggested a transplanting model or a 'long bottleneck' to account for the limited genetic variation, rather than a catastrophic environmental change.[7] This would be consistent with suggestions that in sub-Saharan Africa numbers could have dropped at times as low as 2,000, for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, before numbers began to expand again in the Late Stone Age.[8]

I hope this doesn't get me banned from the lounge.