Adriana wrote
> Mount Toba blew 800 cubic kilomenetrs of ash 71,000 years ago.
Most of India was buried under it. But the worst was yet to come when
it ensued the global volcanic winter for 6 years, which probably
killed 75% of plants in the Northern Hemisphere. The constant
reflection of the heat from the snow back into the space pushed the
Earth into a thousand-year ice age.
I have seen more accurate dating that ives the date 73,200 years ago.
A minor quibble but it is important because it would seem that prior
to that date modern Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) were actually
confined to Africa.
Thus
> I believe that humans survived in isolated pockets through out
the continents. The Urals are a good possibility - a very old
mountain
with good fertilizing sediment exposed, with a lot of protection, and
wildlife. And the same can be persued through other continents.
Homo sapiens had not got as far as the Urals at that date, Adriana.
There is even some doubt that Neanderthals made it quite as far as
that.
> From time to time, Earth does her cataclismic tricks. 540
millions ago, the buildup of continents at South pole flipped her to
the current 23 degree tilt.
> What if Earth is much much older? Big mistakes were often made
at estimating cosmos. What if we lived much longer than is known?
Many
times humanity was wiped out by disasters almost to the last one of
us.(Even the Book tells us so). But we kept on multiplying,
developing particular traits, and then we meet at the crossroads, and
argue who was there first.
In reply to your points here, firstly 540 million years ago there
were
no humans. This was the beginning of the Cambrian Era, and the
beginning of complex life (Phanerozoic) on the planet. The Previous
periods
Hadean - 4.5 billion to 4 billion years
Archaeozoic - 4 billion to 2.2 billion years
Protozoic - 2.2 billion to .53 billion years
show the world is much older than 540 million years.
Just one final thing. It appears that Modern Humans had tried to
leave Africa before via Palestine. Caves there at Jebel Qafseh show
Homo sapiens at 90,000 replaced by younger Neanderthals. This has
been a hard fact for archaeologists, convinced of Homo sapiens
superiority, to accept. Here Neanderthals seem to have been superior
to H.s. The Lake Toba explosion seems to have been the stimulating
factor for the increase in Ice Coverage at that time (Just as the
explosion of Lake Taupo in New Zealnad produced the "Little Ice Age"
of the thirteenth century and the Mongol Invasions of the
neighbouring
states). The 70,000 Ice Age caused modern humans to retreat back
into
Africa (Neanderthal Mousterian Technology is found in Egypt and Libya
at this time).
The Ice Age caused sea levels to fall, however, opening up a second
route "out of Africa", across a land bridge across the Red Sea from
the Afar Triangle into Yemen, that was not blocked by Neanderthals.
Modern Humans managed to cross that land bridge and travel eastwards,
following the earlier footprints of the Homo errectus who had
travelled the same route nearly two million years earlier.
Anatomically modern Humans had arrived in Southern China and crossed
the oceans into Australia by 63,000 BCE.
Modern humans only arrived in Europe in the period 40,000-35,000
years
ago, with the appearance of specialised "blade" tools and the
adaption
from hunter gathering into "specialsed big game" Aurignacian cultures
(possibly Dene-Caucasian speaking). This gave Homo sapiens a slight
advantage so that H.s replaced Neanderthals by 28,000 BCE (having
lived side by side for about 12,000 years, more than twice as long as
humans have been living in cities).
A third and fourth "out of Africa" wave occurred after the Ice Age,
when climates warmed, carrying microlithic "broad spectrum" Nostratic
cultures out of Africa (about 15,000 BCE) and then carrying
Afro-Asiatic Semitic culture peoples into Palestine (about 6,000 BCE).
Hope this helps
John