This is the story of the Star that nearly wiped-out humanity! Scholz star is a dim binary stellar system about 22 light years from Earth. Thousands of years ago this star system was an awful lot closer and it has been determined it passed within a mere 52,000 astronomical units from our own Sun.
Around 74,000 years ago Earth underwent a catastrophic super-volcano eruption at what is now Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. The pyroclastic flows destroyed an area over 7,700 sq mi—with ash deposits as thick as 2,000 feet. It was twelve times greater compared to more recent 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, which caused The Year Without Summer of 1816.
Toba caused a global cooling that would last decades, devastating life. A ten-year volcanic winter triggered by the eruption could have largely destroyed the food source of humans, causing a severe reduction in the population size—creating a bottleneck in human evolution.
We mark the start of Year #4 of the Thunderbolts show with Gareth Samuel, creator of “See the Pattern” and EU advocate. Gareth tells the story of our planet’s 10,000 sole survivors of Toba who rebuilt the human race—based on coalescence evidence of DNA and the relatively low level of genetic variation in humans.
