King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST)
A catastrophic drop in atmospheric ozone levels around the tropics is likely to have contributed to a bottleneck in the human population around 60 to 100,000 years ago, an international research team has suggested. The ozone loss, triggered by the eruption of the Toba supervolcano located in present-day Indonesia, might solve an evolutionary puzzle that scientists have been debating for decades.
“Toba has long been posited as a cause of the bottleneck, but initial investigations into the climate variables of temperature and precipitation provided no concrete evidence of a devastating effect on humankind,” says Sergey Osipov at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, who worked on the project with KAUST’s Georgiy Stenchikov and colleagues from King Saud University, NASA and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.