Doomed to Fail - Ep 38: Volcanoes Pt 1 - Mt. Toba's Echo: Journey into Earth's Cataclysmic Past

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Volcanoes Part 1! Way, way, way back - approx 74,000 years ago, Humans and human-like species were enjoying their time on earth with clear skies when Mt. Toba erupted in Indonesia. The blast kicked off a thousand-year ice age and killed countless animals and vegetation. In the end, only the strong survived - and we are all descendants of about 2,000 people (who were all descended from the same woman in Africa from about 200k years ago) and a handful of Neanderthals. This is a story of DNA, fossils, carbon dating, and how little we know about our time on Earth. Also, James Watson of DNA is STILL ALIVE as of this recording - he’s 95. Hilarious pics from Midjourney AI and some from the creative commons. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Taylor's getting our papers ready. I feel like this is another one where I, like, accidentally, like, learned a bunch of stuff that was not what I was thinking I was going to learn. And it's going to be very complicated. And I'm going to be wrong. So I just wanted to say to everyone that I'm not a scientist. Taylor is not a scientist.

Yep. Well, we'll do a drug out. Yes, we'll figure this out. Welcome to Doob to Fail. This is the podcast. We're discussed two stories. Shit, no, we don't. We do one now.

So we're going to discuss two stories twice a week about relationships that we're doomed to fail. I'm Fards, joined by Taylor. Hi. And these are totally separate days that we're talking. It's Wednesday. It's Wednesday. It's a little bit cares. It's fine.

Okay. It's fine. Um, cool. So as I mentioned on Monday, I am super interested in those like big shared volcano drinks that are like potentially on fire. So let's put a pin in doing that together. If you have had a big flaming volcano drink, please send photos. I'd love to see and learn more about it. Um, are you doing this. So not yet. We're going to get there though. So I have some some tangents that got me here. Of course, this one is one that also has seven, thousand tangents. But we follow both with our podcast and myself, just like a fun Instagram account

called Dark Theme Reddit. So it's like asking questions like, have you ever died? Have you ever seen anybody die? Like what's the craziest thing that ever happened to you at this point? So it's just like fun little interesting stories. And one of them was what is the worst event in human history? So I was reading through it. Like some of them were jokes. Some of them were like, you know, actual terrible things. But one thing that someone mentioned that I have never heard. of is the toba volcano. So I was going to research the toba volcano, but it actually turned into a story about DNA, human genealogy, and how stupid racism is. Like, racism is serious because it's a real thing and it really happens. But racists, generally speaking, well, racist are dumb.

It's dumb to be racist because race is so brand new in human history because human history is so old. So I'm going to do a series that it's going to be, it's not going to be, I'm not going to do it like one after the other because this will turn into an entirely different podcast, but it's actually going to be a seven-part series on volcanoes. Whoa. This is part one. I'll tell you what they're going to be. Well, part one is the toba catastrophe theory from 74,000 years ago. Okay. So we're going way back.

Way, way back. then we'll do Mount Vesuvius that was in 79 then we'll do but obviously there's like tons of stuff happened between 74,000 years ago and 79 but these are the ones that we know more about now so then we'll do Mount Vesuvius we'll do Tambora that was in 1816 that's the one that when that one erupted it was a year without a summer they made everything really gloomy and that's when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein because everything was really gloomy they had to see inside. There's also Crackatoa that happened in 1883. We know more about that because by then telegraphs weren't invented, but Crackatoa is the one where the whole, the sky all over the

world turned orange, and that's when Edward Munch painted the scream. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. And the sky looked like that in Europe because of Cracotoa in Indonesia. So because that's how like world going over it is. Then we'll talk about Montpellay. That was in 1902. That's what I know less about, but it had some like crazy stories about. just like animals running and stuff so i'll do that one number six mountain st helens in 1980 so that one happened like um the most like recently in in washington state um and then for part seven talk about the future and like what's going to happen when yellowstone erupts because we're all going to die how does this have to do with genealogy and race oh we're going to get there okay

this is unique taylor i know here we go so part one here's the book that I read twice to write take notes. It's called When Humans Nearly Vanished by Donald R. Pratherio. He's obviously a scientist. So that's this story about Mount Toba. I also like not randomly. I was listening to Dan Carlin's amendment. So it's like his like short like kind of like chatty podcast. And he did one called the long game. And he just talks about this concept of like how old earth is and how old humanity is and how little we know. know you know humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and we know like maybe 10,000 years of history from like bits of pottery you know like we know so so very little and we like imagine that like the world became worth knowing about when people could write it down but like how do we know you know there's so much more we didn't tell it has another podcast he does like a shorter one where he like sometimes interviews people sometimes you just like chat like this one he's he always like he's so oh he's the best he's always like very apologetic like well

you guys keep telling me that I should just like talking to the microphone so here I am and we're like yeah thank you exactly what we want what's that called he's like amendum addendum ADD-D-E-N hardcore history addendum is what it does amendom oh my god I lost the word right my life is going to be taking over by this now but we listen to the long game

I listened to that one twice as well it's fantastic but yeah it's like the same it's the same idea that we're going to get here that I've talked about before that like the the existential dress of knowing that most of history, the vast majority of history is lost, you know? Yeah. So I did that.

And then I watched some videos on YouTube just to, like, wrap my head around this. So one about how did humans become the Earth's dominant species and how many of species humans were there? So just I'll put those in. But also in one of the videos I watched, they said, so Dan, Dan obviously says Genghis Khan. Changis. He says Changus. He says Changus. Dan says Jenghis Khan in this one I watched it said they said

Jenghis Genghis Khan whatever it was terrible I was like I can't do this like we need to like it's it's very confusing but one more thing that I wanted to mention before I really go into this is I did make a cool like timeline of all of my episodes and like they really definitely like lean 1500 and and future into the future the most recent one I did with the 63 of Jack Ruby. So I want to, like, fill in that big gap. But if I put this eruption of Toba, 74,000 years ago on my timeline, you wouldn't be able to see anything. It's like an outlier and outliers.

Yeah. So I put it at negative 500. And then I also was like, why don't we just say negative? Why are we doing this AD, B, C, C, E thing? And I discovered that there is an astronomical year numbering thing that people do, but it's based on different calendars. And anyway, I'm going to say negative from now on. Go for it. Great.

So a little bit more about what Dan Carlin was saying and kind of what I'm going to get into is, you know, people have only only existed for such a very small amount of time in a term that I must have heard before, but just heard doing this research is paleo archaeology. So we're talking like really like human archaeology, but like from a long time ago. And there's just so much that we don't know. And also like a lot of this does kind of like lead into. into racism and into people thinking that like some parts some kinds of humans are better than other kinds of humans um because you don't everyone wants to believe that they're like descendants of kings but we're all probably descendants people trying to fucking survive like we are you know um so and also like we talked about before like there is no romantic past like

trying to go back to you that's all a myth like there's just like people trying to survive for for all of time um so it's just a lot thinking about how far away the past is and how far away the future is and just like we're just such a small little blip in our time. But the TLDR of the Toba volcano and everything that happened 74,000 years ago is that all humans on Earth have the same ancestor. She was a woman who lived in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago. So for whatever happened, she was the one who her family line is the one that survived and the one that continued and we are all descendants of her. Okay, can I ask questions? Yes.

How can anybody know that? Well, okay, I will get there. It's very complicated. Okay. Okay. So have you done, have you done 23 and me? No, because I want my great, great ancestors or whatever, down the line to be able to commit whatever crimes they want and not have it traced back. No, I want mine to be able to be punished for the crime.

Because that's how we found this woman. 250,000 years ago. I know. So here's, so wait, I didn't even finish my TLDR. So we're all one species of human, as you'll notice, around 70,000 years ago, there was a genetic bottleneck that really, like, cut down the different, any diversity that we had, and we're all descendants of about 1,000 couples also that happened 70,000 years ago. So those couples came from that woman from 200,000 years ago.

only about a thousand like mating pairs of humans are you know all of us right now so what happened and why is it like that so i did do 23 in me and what it does one thing that it does is you can only get this DNA from a woman because it's like the for the maternal heppel group so it's like your your maternal DNA so if you like if you and your brother did it did 23 to me you wouldn't be able to see your maternal line, your mom would have to do it too. And, like, Kincaid did 23A me and he couldn't see his maternal line until I did it because it's only in women. What is? The maternal DNA that, like, shows your families, like your genetic migration from the time that we lived in Africa 200,000 years ago. So I can trace my maternal haple group. It goes from

Africa through the Middle East and then up into Europe and then that's how we like got here. Okay. So it's like so long ago, you know, but I, but then, but I can tell from my DNA that 47,000 years ago is when we, my group of my history moved over to Europe. Okay. I can see that on this map that 23 of me gave me. So 70,000 years ago after the Toba volcano, the only human species that survived were us and the Neanderthals. And they eventually died out and we'll talk a little about maybe why. But just so you know, those are the only ones that existed.

And so I wrote, we won. Yay. Anyway, people. Welcome. So we're going to get to this volcano, I promise. But so, yes, this is the question. So how do we know anything about anything? That's one of my headers.

in my notes. It's a lot of scientific research, a lot of accidents, a lot of people looking for different things and finding things at the same time that reached the same conclusion. So we knew a little bit about like what species are and how we figured out about our own evolution, but that is so new. Like it's just unbelievably new that we know about DNA, that we know about like our genetic structure. They are, there's like hundreds of thousands of years between any changes like in like in evolution so it's not like you know one day you don't have a tail you know it like takes a long time like oh now we're walking upright now we don't need the tail for balance like now this and this um we can also so when we do this research and go back and

start being able to date things because we know more about DNA and we know more about like being able to date um like different things like uranium and the things that we know about uh like the earth they're pulling up pieces of the core of like ice core and like earth core and they can pull it up and say we can tell from this spot and this core that like 10,000 years ago the weather was like this you know or things were like this so we know that there's been ice ages we know that there's been like times of like severe drought we also can know that like the current climate change is our fault because it's never been climate change as bad as it is right now you know and we know that because of these like cores that we're we're um were drilling out. There's a substance called uranium 238. And it can analyze, it is inside the glass in volcanic ash. So in 1994, a scientist was looking for more evidence of the same ash that he'd been seeing wherever he found it. And they found it all over the world. So it was in the bottom of the oceans. It's in India. It's in the Americas. It's in, it's everywhere. And it's from 70-ish thousand years ago

and it's from Mount Tobah. So they can tell by that volcanic ash glass that it's all from the same event that happened relatively wrong at the same time. So they're assuming that it was the same thing. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Okay. So then it's also, so there's like that dating of like minerals and glass and ash. Oh God, I hope no scientists listen to this, but you know what I mean. And there's also human DNA which you learned about in school

which shape is DNA it's the cricket thing ladder double helix double helix yeah but you're right with the name of the guy yes because it's James Watson and Francis Crick they're the ones who came up with the theory of DNA you're close

so Watson and Crick they were working with a woman named Rosalind Franklin and she was seeing the same thing discovering the same things about DNA that they were working side by side. And she was hesitant to publish because she didn't feel like it was fully ready to publish yet. Watson and Crick didn't give a shit. And they published anyway. And they bullied her out of the university they were working with. And she had to leave all of her research behind and go somewhere else where she would be

like free to like study at her own pace. And she died at age 37 from cancer, probably from all the x-rays that she was like looking at in her scientific study. and they won the Nobel Prize, but she would have won it to if they would have let her be part of it. No. They didn't teach you that in school. Nope.

So stuff that we know, and again, kind of talking back to race, so they're able to see from DNA that humans have very low genetic diversity. There are, you know, very, very small things in our DNA that make us different at all.

We share like 99% of our DNA, DNA with apes. Like, we're so close to just, like, being back where we were. It's, like, all just, like, an accident or whatever that we got to where we are, but it's very little. It's not, like, huge differences between us. We, there was, like, very recent changes after, you know, people, humans started to move, like, out of Africa, you know, people's skin color would change because they needed to absorb

vitamin D in a way that you didn't need to when you're, like, on the equator, you know, things like that that are like the reason that we're like any different at all. They're annotations. Like it's basically it. Yeah. Another thing that I learned about like early humans, I don't know if I say this again, but I thought it was interesting. Like one of the reasons that humans can run the way we can run is that we're built to outrun our prey. So like if we're chasing like a deer and like the savannah, we want the deer to get so tired that it passes out. And we can do that because we basically lost our hair, like our ape hair, so we could run faster, and we sweat, and other animals don't sweat.

And the fact that we sweat means we can keep going, technically, I definitely couldn't outrun a deer, but, like, you can technically keep going, and the deer has to stop and pant like a dog, like any animal, to cool down. And so they can't keep up as long as we can, theoretically. Taylor, me and you are definitely in the gatherer class of hunter gatherers. I was just going to say, I'm a vegetarian, I'm a vegetarian because this plant, the That has not ran away from me. I'm definitely not surviving.

100%. I mean, other things that helped us, like, survive is, like, being able to eat glucose, because, like, a lot of other, like, most other animals cannot digest glucose. And, like, we can, and that helped us become farmers and, like, stay where we were. But we'll have been farmers for, like, 10,000 years. It's, like, not that long in, like, history of the world. You just remind me of it's, I go on walks with Luna. And, I mean, people who don't know, Luna's, like,

a hundred pounds like shepherd dog who's kind of dark and man she gets so tired so much fast than i do when it comes to like sports of energy i could never come close to matching her but for like like longevity of energy she gets really tired and i think it has to do the sweating thing yeah i think it does too then she like can't she needs to like really stop and like cool her body down and we can do it like actively even though i've certainly never felt cooler when i was sweating also feels like weird but I get it I get technically what my body is trying to do my body is being like go inside yeah go go have a strawberry why are we doing this is stupid um yeah so also so because there's like we're so closely related like we are more closely related to

apes and chimpanzees via our DNA than like any species of frog is to each other it's just like so unbelievably hard to wrap your head around, like, why these changes exist. Also, like, a huge part of our DNA is just junk DNA, which is, like, stuff that, like, maybe we got, you know, maybe somewhere in your DNA, there's something that keeps you safe from a virus that was in Persia 5,000 years ago, you know, but you don't need it anymore. Yeah. But it's still there, which I think is bananas. So, like, what do you mean? It's junk DNA. DNA feels extraordinarily but isn't that why there's some people who can like get um exposed like HIV for example but like don't catch it there's like there's like something about that about how there's

some people that are like weird genetic mutants that like can't contract the things that everybody else can yeah there's like so then yeah like when something weird happens in your code that's when you do have every once in a while there is a kid born with a tail you know yeah yeah you know and stuff like that web hands or web feed or whatever yeah yeah like it's just like one little thing in there that like does it which is really crazy so i'm thinking through like looking at like a map of like what people are it's not it's obviously not like a straight line it's not like monkeys cavemen us you know there's there's a whole bunch of branches um as it is with like every animal and every kind of animal. Um, but essentially, um, there are animals that are in the same species. And so if two

individuals can breed and produce fertile offspring, they're of the same species. So like dogs, they're different, but they can breed and have a baby that can have babies. So they're same species. Wait, can a human fuck a chimpanzee? Um, yes, but we're not going to have a child. human can fuck anything but you're not going to but you're not going to have a child okay well on

so okay same species different breeds works yes but we don't have breeds do we no but we used to that's what we're going to

tell you about yeah which is crazy because I think I'm going maybe say this later but like this is me overthinking everything but sometimes I'm watching

like a show with like cartoons you know and it's like a cat and a dog and they're in love And I'm like, yeah, but you can't have babies, you know, or like, where are you going to live? It's like, Mom, please stop screaming at the TV. Yeah.

And then also, like, I totally understand, like, having babies is not the reason to be in a relationship. But, like, I think that is the idea that there would be another human type that is not us that you could potentially, like, marry is so banana. It's not merry, but like, whatever, you know what I mean? Like, there are others. And there's, I'll tell you about that. We're not the first. Yeah. So again, this is like, I thought about Googling different human breeds and was like, yeah, my computer is immediately going to get fly by the FBI. So I'm starting to do it. I know. I was like, everything also, I'm like, please don't this be racist. I just want to tell this story. But so I just like make sure that I'm like reading actual science, you know, not accidentally someone who's like trying to make a point that's not good. But all of this is from like almost.

no evidence they find like a jawbone in a cave you know and like somehow they know that it was like this type of human so i don't know i don't understand that it feels like um paleo archaeology is like paleo um tology where like every time i go to a dinosaur museum they're like we thought this until yesterday and now it's this you know yeah yeah i mean who knows but they they we were at the um the natural history museum in new york city a couple weeks ago and there was like one thing that had these arms, these like dinosaur arms that were like 10 feet long and the sign was like

unknown arms. Like found these arms. We don't know who they belong to. Like it's weird, right? You're like, yeah, it's weird. I want to know more. But like, they're just trying to figure it out like very slowly. So the oldest human ish bone

that they found is potentially from six million years ago in, it was found in Chad. It's called a two my man. Some of the things that you start to see that start to lean more towards being like more more like a modern human is starting to walk upright and having a larger brain cavity. So like the walking upright came first and then a brain cavity has got bigger and bigger. There's Arthopachianicus. This is really hard from like five million years ago. There's Australyctus. I'm so sorry.

From four to two million years ago. And they were the first like hominins belonging to a genus that was like near ours so there are a crucial step in human evolution um that's like lucy have you heard of lucy i have that like gelatin so lucy is astro oh god austroplific i really thought i could do this austroplictus whatever around i'll write it down after that's like 42 million years ago starting to walk on two eggs a crucial step in evolution so you said you said it was um six million years ago yes potentially the to my found in chad did you find that one well i'm looking at these don't go back six million years they go back like hundreds of thousands of years oh they're different oh they're

different kinds there's homo it's not homo sapiens it's like homo erectus and homo whatever all kinds of exactly exactly and that's what i mean they're different species of like are what the next one is up of humans of the the homo us so homininia hominina is the is the overarching category that we all fall under i think yes okay close enough so there's some fossils from like 2.8 2.3 million years ago or we start to get into our genus, the Homo habilis is one of the first ones. They're the ones that had bigger brains and walked. And then we also, you know, had to, there's one from 2.3 million years ago. There's a Homo Rodolphinus. And that, and these all also have names, like the name of the of the fossil from Homo Rodolphus from 2.3 million years ago is K-N-M-E-R-1470. Yeah, I saw that too.

Yeah, it's like isotopes. Yeah, it's unbelievable. So it could be that the homoerodolphus is a different species or could just be another of the homo habilis is. It's hard to tell. This is also, like, I know that we talked about, I was talking about dinosaurs, but parents, there's a TV show called Dino Dana that is so fun.

And so Dina Dana is like a little girl who can see dinosaurs. And she's a delight, and it's very, you learn a ton. But the Dianna movie, the question they're asking, is why aren't there any kid dinosaurs? Like, why don't you find children dinosaurs? And the answer is that some of the dinosaurs that we think are different dinosaurs are actually the children of bigger dinosaurs. You know?

So it's not that we're not two different species. It's like just the child. So some of the things that we're finding, they're very specific. Like, the idea that a Neanderthal is like a hunched over, like, man is because the first one we found was an old man who had rickets. So, like, take a skeleton. from like one of the worst of us and say that's what humans look like. Yeah, makes sense.

We just don't know. The Homo erectus, those are like, those are ones that you may have heard of, like the Java man and the Peking man, like, found around around the world. That's from like 1.9 million years ago. And there's also been hoaxes. So once people started to say, like, you know, we are descendants from these different homo species and they're from, species of like apes, then people would like, buy an ape skull, take the jaw off, put human teeth on it, and try to sell it to a museum. It's pretty smart, actually. That's kind of, that's, that's an entrepreneur right there. So a lot of that happened in the beginning. In the beginning, I mean like 100 years ago. It's not even, it's not even new.

In 1.9 million years ago in Africa, Homo erectus is when you think about like standing up the tallest, went further with tools. They have bigger brains. There's, that's the Java man and the Peking man. Homo erectus, there's evidence that they, like, had art. You know, they were the only Homo sapiens on Earth for a while, or the Homo species on Earth, the Homo erectus, longer than we were, longer than us. Like, they lasted longer than we did so far. That's the convergence. That's, like, where, like, everything, I'm looking at this, like, amazing genealogy map. And that's what I'm saying. It's so much. Yeah. It's so a lot. Like, this is, like, so many people have probably spent their entire lives just researching, like, one aspect of one of these things. 100%. So now we get to Homo sapiens. They are, it's like homo antecessor. That's where we come from. There are offshoots, just like in anything else. There are others that are just like one jaw, so you just don't know. But it's potentially the ancestor of everyone, you know, we're homo sapiens. Theandotals are in the group Homo, but a distinct species happen at the same time. So for a while, we thought that they were, that they were totally separate, but we're not sure. It's definitely,

a distinct side quest and but neanderthals they definitely were healthy they cared for each other they were artistic they used tools um in my 23 and me uh DNA I have more Neanderthal DNA than 70% of the population 77% of the population and I have a little bit less than 2% Neanderthal DNA well so wait wait hold on that means that we we enter oh yeah because we're the same we're different breeds of the same species. Yep. Wow. So you can mate with a Neanderthal and have a child, and that child can have children, which is how you get Neanderthal DNA into the DNA of most humans, unless you can

trans your line all the way into Africa that you've never left Africa, then you don't have it, but everybody else does. Wow. This has to do with the toba as well. So there's a couple other, what question is like, you know, why did the Neanderthals go extinct? It could be because they just got like absorbed

into the Homo sapiens population. It could because they were a little bit violent. It could be one of the reasons I think maybe it's because Homo sapiens were able to get, domesticate dogs and have dogs help them hunt. And Neanderthals didn't do that. So we got all the food. So there's like a bunch of different theories is why

Indianitals don't exist anymore. And that we're the only species of homo sapien out there. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's saying that 20% of Neanthral genes have survived in our DNA. Yeah. It's a lot. That was a lot of, I'm saying that there's a lot of overlap is, you know.

Yes. Which I think, which is crazy. Which is what I think is crazy that there's, you could be like, I know, like now, you know, racists are like, we're all so different. You're like, actually, we're not. But if there was actually a different species of human, that'd be crazy. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because it breaks, if you look at the Wikipedia for Neanderthals and

interpreting with modern humans, it talks about the differences in terms of like geography and the density of the average person, neonorphins. So Eurasians, it says 3.4 to 7.9% is Neanderthal DNA. And there's variations in every part of the world. So like some places like to fuck Neanderthals more than others, I guess. I don't mean. Well, I think because they were there more because they were in the cold areas. Oh, there were up in, like, they're up in in Europe.

They're up in Northern Asia where it's cold. Yeah, that's why there were not Neanderthals in Africa because it was too hot for them. So they were up in other places. And it wasn't like a day. It wasn't like, they were like, this is hot for me. Let's move. It was like, you know, generations of migrating and like moving around. Yeah.

Okay. Cool. So there's other things. And again, this is like, it's wild because they're going to find something new tomorrow. You know, like who knows? In 2010, someone found a 41,000-year-old fingerbone of a child that could be another branch from 600, up to 600,000 years ago called the Denosovian. It isn't Homo sapien or Neanderthal, so it might be something else.

So they found it could be a third one that we don't know about that lasted longer. In 2003, there's evidence of like a group of people in the island of Flores, like in Indonesia, that are descended from H. Erectus, but they're like off the chute of homo sapiens, but they were also very small. So they like literally call them hobbits. they would have been about 3.7 inches tall because they were like ice- feet or inches?

That feet, feet, feet, my God, sorry, feet. Jesus, that would be awesome. They're 3.7 feet tall, so they're like little because they all lived on an island where there was like not a lot of diversity and like their food and they didn't have to be that big. So again, over 100,000 of years. But there's another one as well. So who knows what else are going to find?

They're going to find all sorts of stuff as they continue to like be able to search and date these things. Okay. So, quick side chat about volcanoes. Do you know how a volcano works? It is a caft mountain with a hollow cavity in the center that is connected to the mag. I forgot which part of the core it is, but it's somehow connected to the center of the earth. And there's a magma chamber. And when it builds up with too much pressure, it explodes. at the top. Yes, pretty close.

It's the titanic plates in the world moving, and then sometimes they, you know, obviously they hit each other and we get earthquakes, sometimes if they push up against each other, you get kind of like a weak spot that is like a, essentially like a tiny crack in the magma, in the, in the earth's structure, and that is what a volcano is. So inside the earth, there's the magma and the pressure build. up because the plates are moving, the mega wants to escape. So it pushes up, it finds a weak spot which is a volcano and it'll

push up and it will do a couple of things. It'll do lava, which is like you've seen some volcanoes are like the ones you see in Hawaii which are like really slow moving lava coming down off the side of the mountain. You'll see those are like

on the scale. It's like the Richter scale where like the difference between one and three is huge. The same idea. So like a volcano in in Hawaii would be like a zero or a one on the scale because it's just like kind of like slowly moving definitely dangerous and scary but like not a huge thing and the ones that are huge like krakatoa like the ones that you like run across the world those are like a four where you can like see it across the whole entire world tobo was like a tent so this one's like this is the biggest volcano they think in the history of the world the toba volcano um so another thing that happens with volcanoes is it's not just like lava spreading everywhere the big problem is actually actually the ash. So the volcanic ash shoots up into the air like miles and then the wind just takes it and that's when it can like cover the earth because the wind is like taking these like miles of ash kind of all over the whole world. And volcanic ash is also very, very heavy.

So like it's not like being if you think of, I think of ash as being like really light because it's ash, you know, it's in the air. The volcanic ash is heavy and it's dense. So like during like when the Toba volcano, I'll tell you that in second, it exploded in Indonesia, it covered India with like a foot of ash. Wow. Because it's like, and it like hardens and turns into rock. It can also like help the soil. It can be like a, it's a nutrient dense, but it also, you know, kills you and it's hot with

balls. Do you remember when that volcano exploded in New Zealand in 2019 when people were on vacation? So there's a woman named, it was just, it wasn't lava. was like the ash that hit the hit the people um there's a woman named stephanie browit her father and her sister died um in new zealand's north island but there she survived with so such severe burns there's a photo of her that she shared um in the hospital of her back and it looks like a anatomical model of muscles because all of her skin is gone what's her name stephanie brow it b r o w i t so she's a survivor of a volcano, but

just like, that's like one of the terrible things that it does to you. Wow. Oh, God. So besides, obviously, yeah, do you know what I mean? Like, it's just like, it's not like a little, the ash isn't just like, oh, there's some ash floating. The ash is incredibly hot.

It's what boils your brain. You know, it's what kills you. Like, that's a huge, a huge thing. So that's what this woman Stephanie got hit with was the ash, on actual, like, lava? Well, I guess if lava hits you, it just melts you immediately. Yeah, you can't even get close to, um, to lava. You know how, like, in movies, people are, like, hanging over lava.

If you're, like, within 10 feet of lava, you catch on fire and probably less than that. You know, it's like, it's not like, it's not a joke. Yeah. So that's how a volcano works. Mostly is the ash. It's the biggest problem because that is what can travel across, like, the entire globe. So now it is 74,000 years ago. And most species are gone. There are the Neanderthals in Europe. There's a homo sapiens in Africa and Eurasia that's just starting to move out of Africa. There are those hobbits in Flores. And there's also some Aterrectus in Eurasia. But really quickly, the hobbits and the Aterrectus are gone after the Toba volcano. So how do we know this happened 74,000 years ago? in the 1990s, people started to have different ideas and they're finding things in rocks

and fossils and DNA that all pointed to the same thing. A genetic bottleneck, 74,000 years ago that means a lot of different things came from a small survivor population. So that's like most of the homo sapiens are wiped out in a small population that 1,000 couples are the ones that we are all descendant from. So something must have happened. And so all of anything that was going to make us diverse in different areas was gone. And we were just like, one small survivor population they also see the same thing that happened in pandas and tigers all at the exact same time well wait these were homo sapiens a thousand okay yeah yes and that's where we're we're all descended from is those those people and um the there's other like

microorganisms that have the same thing they in the book i was reading like there's probably so many other animals that have the same genetic bottleneck but we know about about tigers and pandas because they're cute. Yeah, that makes sense. But, like, there's probably some ugly animals that similarly. So the Neanderthals are in, you know, Eurasia and Europe. Homo sapiens are starting to spread out of Africa. There's large animals as well, which is, which are like, which I think is so fun.

I mean, you learn about, like, giant bears and giant sloths and, like, just giant animals. Super fun. But they're all going to get to go pretty soon. So there's this volcano near Sumatra, which is the Toba volcano. Also, reminders Sumatra is where Van Gogh was supposed to go to do as military service, but they paid someone else to go. Nice to roll back. So when the day that the Mount Toba volcano exploded,

we will never know what day it was or like exactly what happened. But ash and pumice have started to roll out of the top of the volcano. now so this is starting to happen then um when it actually explodes and is an explosion so crackatoa that we'll talk about later in our series is like the one that a lot of people have heard about that was the one like the 1880s um when that happened a sonic boom went around the earth seven times so like people heard it everywhere you know like it was the it was the loudest thing anyone's ever recorded or anyone has ever heard mount toba was a thousand times more powerful than that that's crazy so nothing in the world just keeps hearing it it um the once the ash

the ash plume went about and like the mushroom cloud and all this stuff was about came out about 200 miles per hour and it went like six miles up into the air um the pumice and ash from mount toba covered about 15 million square miles which is 14% of the earth so it was everywhere six inches of ash covered all of Asia 10 inches covered all of India so it also would have like mixed with dirt and created mudslides there was most likely a tsunami you know probably several tsunamis that like destroyed people where people were living immediately like anything on any coast near it was probably destroyed almost immediately the the ash is coming up It's actually sulfuric acid and sulfur dioxide.

So it's not breathable. It's like ruining the air. Everything in the air is dying. It's also covering the sun. So that's what happened in the year without a summer with Mary Shelley. That's what happened with Krakatoa is like it covers the sun. And then you have a huge cooling event and the weather patterns change and a lot of life dies.

The sunlight's blocked. Things can't grow. Everything dies. There's the hypopatize. that global temperature has decreased anywhere from one to nine degrees. So it's like a huge decrease. Like tons of things don't survive. The tree line fell.

Things were of frozen. We do know that there was an ice age at this time. This is probably why that like an ice age started because of this. So what was left after this happened? We have those 1,000 breeding pairs of people trying to survive between the eruption of toba there was like a 1,000 year ice age and then there was a from from 74,000 years ago to 17,000 years ago it was generally cold that's when all of the large mega mega fauna animals died and people started to just kind of move their small groups out into Europe some state and Africa obviously

but people kind of coming from that that small group of people another thing about a gen another like a genetic bottleneck that I thought was really fun is hamster You know hamsters, you know, hamsters, the cute little pet. All hamsters that you have as a pet come from the same group of hamsters that was found in 1930 in Syria. It was like a wild animal. And some dude was like, I'm going to go find a golden hamster, found a little group of them. They all died out in the wild eventually. And every hamster it exists in someone's cage is from that same family.

Aw, kind of cute. It makes them cuter. It does make them look cute. So that genetic viral neck is because of that group that was, like, taken away from any, like, bad things and put into, like, safely now they just, like, breed like hamsters, you know? So after the Montoba collapsed or erupted, everybody who survived, which was, like, a very small amount of people, they survived because, you know, they were able to find ways to, like, get food at other places that weren't able to. And they were able to go out and then, like, you know, populate the whole, the whole rest of the world. So this is a theory because it's 74,000 years old. So like I said, they learned about DNA in 1960.

We haven't even known for 100 years and how fast things are, how changing and how fast we're learning. Like we might know more tomorrow. We might no more in the year. Like some people think that maybe it was something else that caused us Ice Age, but a lot of the evidence points to Mount Tobah erupting because of like, you know, the ash and the glass and the ash and the uranium and the things that we can like carbon date back there. And we don't have homo sapiens don't differ after that. You know, it's when we like came out and like started to really like become who we think we are today.

There's really good evidence that it's true. There's other mass extinctions. Obviously, like the dinosaurs went extinct. That was probably a meteor. But other kinds of dinosaurs might have gone extinct because of volcanoes. So there's all sorts of things that like we don't know, but it could have been because of these. Because one of a volcano erupts, it's like not just isolated. It can affect the whole world.

I did not add to my list, the one in Iceland, because I absolutely cannot say that one. But you remember when that happened? Yes. There's a nice one special on it. Yeah. I remember seeing things with just like American news trying to pronounce it, and it was just like the best because fuck, you can't pronounce any, any Icelandic words, but it's really fun. So the book that I read that when humans nearly vanished, like, you know, the stresses that, you know, we all come from the same group of people because we were hearty, because we were able to like, get out of this and then we started to move around. So we're all so similar genetically. It's just really

just like such small differences between, you know, anyone of any race. Like that's, that's something that we shouldn't even like consider when we're talking about people because people are also so brand new and there used to be like other types of people and there used to be other things. And there's so much, I mean, the whole world, we don't know anything that happened until so unbelievably recently. But like there will be other volcanoes. We'll talk about what might happen in the future later, but you probably won't die in a mass extinction event. You probably won't die in like San Andreas type California coming off the side of the thing. You probably won't die when Yellowstone finally erupts. That probably will happen, you know, in a long time. People don't really die from these things, but to get a smidge political, the things people are dying from is heat and cold. So more people die of overheating in their homes than of any other natural disaster. because there's, unless there's like a big event, like a tsunami, but like mostly is people not being able to adapt to the current climate change that's killing people. But there have been some volcanoes that we erupted where we actually can know what happens because we have first hand experiences.

So the next one I do is Mount Vesuvius and we have like a firsthand account from plenty of the younger of what happened. And we'll talk about that and then talk about what it looks like in Pompey and what happened to those people next time I get back to Volcano. Taylor, just as a real quick synopsis, am I going to die because of Yellowstone? No, you're going to die because of like, it's going to be too hot to live. I don't think I'm going to die of that. I think I'm probably going to die of... You're more likely to die because it's impossible to be outside at all in America. It is.

Right now it is actually legitimate. Like, I, my dog hates my guts because it's like, why are you keeping me in the house? Like, I can't take you outside. Like, you will die of overheat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it's, I don't know.

What was it in the day after tomorrow? What was that? What was that? Was that a volcano? The day after tomorrow? No, the day after tomorrow, it was an ice age, right? But how did it happen so fast? Oh, God.

That I don't know. No. Science fixture. I'm so sorry, everyone. Coming global super storm. It's extreme weather events and climate change. I don't know. I don't know what happened in one day.

Do you know that NASA came up with a plant on how to prevent Yellowstone from exploding? Did they? Good, because it does scare me. I have seen those images of like yellowstone exploding and just like two seconds later all of America is covered in ash and then it's like Canada's gone Mexico's gone the ash plumes everywhere in terms of large explosions yellowstone experienced three at two 1.3 and half a million years ago I mean it's like that and like the big the big earthquake like they're like it could happen in a thousand

years or it could happen tomorrow you're like god damn it i mean listen i when i was living in l.a i actually thought about that like i mean you you remember there are times when you'd wake up and your bed was like in the middle of the room because you were going through an earth i mean my first earthquake and it was at your friend's place remember the guy that um you you i mean his apartment or some i sub lease from him and the first time i experienced i was like what the fuck is it was terrifying it was absolutely terrifying it's so confusing because you're like like i know what i should do an earthquake right now i'm not actively having one but when happens you first you need someone to confirm it's an earthquake so you've

otherwise you're like am i going crazy you think your cars run into the building because it just feels so off it's so loud too like you're the building like at least the couple times that i've been in when like the building it shakes in a way that you're like huh and then the other thing that comes to your mind is you're like is this going to be that big one like should i be panicked right now because you're so clutch with like terror in the moment and confusion so my mom was like because i mean she was like i love the movie san andreas i watched it all the time and i was like i can't watch it that much because it scares me i was like but i understand you know the rock is very handsome in that i get it um yeah so okay so that is the toba

catastrophe series that 74 000 years ago a big volcano exploded, changed who humans are because so many different types of human species died out that just a small group survived. And that turned into us. We are all related. The Earth is terrifying. Let's take good care of it before it kills us because it's 100% going to kill us. And clear this. Should we, we should be racist or we should not be racist? You should not be racist. Not be racist. Okay. Racist is brand new. We're all, we're all. We're all. We're all. We're all people. Come on, in nerds. We're all people.

Some of the stuff, like I said, there were some hoaxes. Like, some of the hoaxes are like, you know, people, like, when they're finding this stuff out and, like, finding these homo sapiens in Africa to prove that, like, we're all from the same woman in Africa, you know, however many, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago, people in Europe are pissed, you know. Like, the Nazis were pissed. They were like, there's no way that, that, you know, the first human came from Africa, you know. And then they're like, he must have come from here. and they like really wanted really really really wanted humans to come from europe and like they just didn't get over it that was one good thing about opanheimer was it brought up the fact that the nazis didn't believe in like actual physics because real physics was mostly created by like jewish people

like all the best physicists in the world were jewish and they were like those nerds their racism prevented them from being successful and being good racist like that was it was like the most ironic thing ever oh my god they they just handed Einstein to us exactly exactly he was the smartest guy ever and you just give them to us um yeah totally yeah so all that's just it's just so new and it's so interesting um and fun so you know diversity is fun we're all people we're all people this is good this is a really creative concept taylor like you're you're like throwing me for a loop here it's making me realize i got to set my game up but i really love this story I'm excited about the next one and the next one after that and all seven parts.

So thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. It'll be in no particular timeline, but, you know. But yeah, also, have you been to Pompeii? No. I haven't this one. I'll talk more about it.

That's cool. Yeah. We'll do it. Folks, remember, write to us at doom to fail pod at juml.com. We'd love to hear people's feedback. And thank you for listening. with your friends. Yeah, please share. Find us Doomed to Fill a pod

everywhere that you listen to podcasts and see things. I'm so sorry, I have one more thing to share. Art Bell wrote the afternoon tomorrow. Oh, really? Yes, and his Wikipedia picture, he's smoking a cigarette

and wearing a turtleneck and it was pretty awesome. Pretty fun. He does look very cool. That's all. Cool. Thanks, Farris. Sweet. Thanks all. Bye. Thank you.