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Sunday, January 20. 2013

The Peopling of the World, re-posted

A hearty Coors Light toast to Assistant Village Idiot in Conventional Wisdom Kicked to the Curb, who found this fine interactive site which explains the new ideas, based on recent mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) evidence, of the world migrations of the human species from East Africa to around the world.


That theoretical eruption of Mount Toba 74,000 years ago almost might have wiped us out. The Ice Ages sure put a damper on things too. Changes in climate determined much of mankind's history.


Barring another Mount Toba, and with the help of some much hoped-for global warming, humans might populate the entire globe with cozy bungalows.


But we'll have another Mount Toba, for certain, sometime.

Posted by Bird Dog in History at 14:36 | Comments (13) | Trackback (1)

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Harnessing technology to open up the ancient past
If you are collecting information about your family origins, you must see The Peopling of the World to see how far back your ancestors go.  Kudos to the Bradshaw Foundation for the presentation created by Stephen Oppenehimer that shows...
Weblog: Legacy Matters
Tracked: Nov 16, 08:48

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Cool stuff, Bird Dog. Good old homo sapiens made it through, but too bad we had to kill off the neanderthals, homo erectus, and all the large land mammals in Europe, east Asia and the Americas to do it. Imagine going Woolly Mammoth hunting in Manitoba ... fun times and good eats for sure.
#1 The Dylanologist on 2007-11-04 15:32 (Reply)
Killed a heck of a lot of homo sapiens too, in the process.
#1.1 BD on 2007-11-04 15:49 (Reply)
Not nearly enough, one might argue.
#1.1.1 Anonymous on 2007-11-04 20:06 (Reply)
As for the Mount Toba catastrophe theory, I thought that University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was in the middle of corn fields not hemp. Maybe it was meant a screen play that came too late for Harrison Ford and then was put forth as a theory. In any event, anthropology has always been a creative field for fictiion writers.
#2 John Hetman on 2007-11-04 19:23 (Reply)
Do I hear a skeptic?
#2.1 BD on 2007-11-04 20:50 (Reply)
There are two places that are loosely connected to post-K/T extinction events: Mt. Toba and the current Yellowstone hot spot. Also the last of the Deccan Traps eruptions, if memory serves.

It is a necessary reminder that the crustal plate movements that started to get going 70-100 MYA started to quickly change global environments: removing the shallow (~1km) deep continental seas changed the entire heat storage system of Earth... as did Antarctica slowly moving into a polar position, which gave the planet a huge heatsink to radiate heat into space. The boloid of 65 MYA chilled the planet down by blocking out sunlight and the heat left the oceans, after that the low residual heat left could be tipped over into glacial periods due to volcanic activity and/or minor solar output variations. Until the plates stop their jaunting around and form up a nice supercontinent or just slow down to let the continents subside to get those lovely inland seas, we are stuck with the freeze thaw cycle of the global thermometer. And that hand that reaches to that are the mega-caldera event volcanoes.

There aren't many of them and they have a long-cycle periodicity... and Yellowstone is overdue... and the caldera has shifted over 3' upwards in the center over the last century. As mankind has never had instruments to record one of these events, we really don't know what its precursors are. This is not a Tambora, Pinatubo, Krakatoa, Thera, Vesuvius or Rainier... those are tiny in comparison to Toba and Yellowstone.

To scale the ash and dust output: consider Mt. St. Helens output to be a sugar cube, then Tambora is a box of sugar cubes you can get at the store... Yellowstone is a crate 3' on a side full of sugar cubes, neatly packed. Tambora gave us the 'year without a summer' and chilly summers for a few years after that. Toba is nasty... Yellowstone is deadly as it goes on century long kicks once it gets started. Out in Washington and Oregon you can see the flood basalt layers that the Snake River and other rivers have cut down through... 10-30' layers of basalt with ash in between... that was laid down when the hot spot of Yellowstone first appeared. Those basalts start at the head of the Snake River Canyon... save for the wide areas that mark where the hot spot erupted... and go out nearly up to Canada and west to the easternmost Cascades. Big flat area out there... a single eruption of Yellowstone has left 10' of ash coverage, in the Gulf of Mexico and 3' out to DC and 1' at Sudbury, Ontario... Toba is Yellowstone's weaker brother.
#3 ajacksonian (Link) on 2007-11-04 21:43 (Reply)
I live not too far from Yellowstone. But not to worry, I've got Homeowner's insurance from Farmer's.
#4 bob on 2007-11-04 22:57 (Reply)
Thank goodness for that. You're covered.
#4.1 BD on 2007-11-04 23:15 (Reply)
That was really cool - I got through the visual, but there is so much information in that, it will take another hour to two just to skim through it.

Very cool BD.
#5 Tom Francis on 2013-01-20 15:08 (Reply)
Yellowstone puts our recent unpleasantness about the economy in perspective. I had been thinking of Costa Rica, and maybe a warm coat, as well.
#6 Mike K (Link) on 2013-01-20 17:43 (Reply)
The Toba eruption itself is not theoretical; indeed the ash is deposited over a wide area of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It was a biggie. It can be seen in deep-sea cores quite clearly (I have seen the ash layer myself in Indian Ocean sediment cores) and tied into marine chronologies as well as being independently dated by argon-argon.

Its impact on climate and on human evolution, if any, is not certain but there is a plausible case for links to climate and evolution.

See:

Ninkovich, D., R. Sparks, and M. Ledbetter (1978), The exceptional magnitude and intensity of the Toba eruption, Sumatra: An example of the use of deep-sea tephra layers as a geological tool, Bull. Volcanol., 41(3), 286-298, doi:10.1007/BF02597228.

Rampino, M. R., and S. Self (1992), Volcanic winter and accelerated glaciation following the Toba super-eruption, Nature, 359, 50-52, doi:10.1038/359050a0.

Rose, W. I., and C. A. Chesner (1987), Dispersal of ash in the great Toba eruption, 75 ka, Geology, 15(10), 913-917, doi:10.1130/0091-7613(1987)152.0.CO;2.

Storey, M., R. G. Roberts, and M. Saidin (2012), Astronomically calibrated 40Ar/39Ar age for the Toba supereruption and global synchronization of late Quaternary records, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(46), 18684-18688, doi:10.1073/pnas.1208178109.
#7 stimpy on 2013-01-21 04:26 (Reply)
Didn't see the Polynesian migration. Perhaps it was too modern for their purposes.
#8 Zachriel on 2013-01-21 09:38 (Reply)
I wondered why there was sudden traffic to a link I posted a few years ago.

I should ask Greg Cochran what he thinks. I don't have a clear grasp myself of what is conjecture, what is minority-but-respectable, and what is generally accepted. This seems plausible to me, and accords with what i knew before from linguistics, or oh, Nicholas Wade.
#9 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2013-01-21 21:58 (Reply)

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