The most challenging period in human history. We almost went extinct as a species.

The eruption of the Toba supervolcano over 100,000 years ago nearly led to the extinction of our species. The world’s population dropped to below 2,000 individuals at that time.

Article bay
4 min readApr 13, 2024
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Since the emergence of the Homo sapiens species, the global population of humans has been gradually but steadily increasing. In the early stages of human history, the population was relatively small, numbering only a few million individuals. However, over millennia, successive generations added millions more people. Migrations in search of safe places on Earth, abundant in easy access to fresh water and food, favored us.

However, this steady growth was interrupted by a dramatic natural disaster, which almost wiped our species off the face of the Earth.

When was humanity last close to extinction?

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