The Theory of Nothing

Is the human race diverse?

Is the human race diverse?

This sounds like a dumb question when viewed from the aspect of current news reports about racial division and conflict. There have been all sorts of studies done that suggest that modern humans evolved in Africa and then spread out to everywhere else and then changed to become the races we see today. Some idiots have tried to claim that Africans and Indians are sub-human species or that humans evolved from Africans. I hate to tell them this but they’re dead wrong. It turns out that all humans on the planet Earth are related to a about two thousand individuals that survived an eruption of a super volcano at Lake Toba in Indonesia, an cataclysmic event that eradicated all but two thousand humans seventy four thousand years ago.

Yes, you heard me right. The human race is the least diverse species on Earth. We are more alike than we once thought. The Toba catastrophe caused a global volcanic winter that lasted many years, possibly a thousand years.

A volcanic winter results when a super volcano erupts and sends mega tons of ash into the atmosphere and blackens out sunlight for decades, causing winter conditions all over the globe. The Toba eruption supposedly threw two thousand to three thousand cubic kilometers of stuff out into the sky. That’s over a hundred times the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia that caused 1818 to be a year without a summer in the northern hemisphere. The Toba eruption deposited an ash layer of around fifteen centimeters thick all over South Asia and sent it all over the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. Since the human population wasn’t that high then (maybe 15,000) it’s easy to see how this event caused a near extinction event.

Yes, our human ancestors could have been wiped out. Think about that one. In any event, it is believed that the two thousand human survivors lived in Africa and because of the Toba eruption event were prompted to go elsewhere. They migrated to better locations to escape the terrible winter conditions that killed off game and plant life that was their food.

This near extinction event gives rise to the Genetic Bottleneck theory or sharp reduction in population concept, and this bottleneck idea accounts for the low level of genetic variation in modern humans. In other words, we are more alike than we are different because of the Toba eruption. Human racial groups may look different, but they are 99.9 % genetically identical.

Keep in mind that humans might have evolved from a single female individual about 150,000 years ago. Could this be the Eve mentioned in the book of Genesis? That’s another theory running around and it’s based on Mitochondrial DNA studies. Mitochondrial DNA is passed on through females and it turns out that we humans are all genetically related to this single female.

Another thing to keep in mind is that humans formed great civilizations only ten thousand years ago. This includes the Egyptians, the ancient Chinese, and the Greeks. Most of these civilizations don’t even go back that far. In other words, modern human society is relatively recent because of the Toba event.

In any event, this genetic bottleneck also happened to many animal species after the Toba event, and although this idea is only a theory, the lack of genetic variation in humans is a fact. We are one family whether we like it or not, so get along, people of Earth.

Thanks for reading.