John Hawks: The So-Called Toba Bottleneck Didn't Happen: "The Toba bottleneck idea came from the initial observation that there might be a coincidence between population expansion times and the Toba eruption, made 20 years ago. But many geneticists (including me) quickly pointed out that the dates of population expansion have little connection to the dates of population contraction...
...and that effective population size might be orders of magnitude smaller than the actual human population. Even in 20-year-old mitochondrial DNA data, it was clear that a single short bottleneck post-Toba could not account for the pattern of variation found in African populations. Meanwhile, human populations in the coldest climate zones, like the Neandertals of Europe, never seemed to show any obvious signs of population reduction at the time of the Toba event. Later, it became clear that the archaeological record much closer to Toba, in India and later Sumatra itself, showed no signs of a major interruption caused by the volcano. It also became clear that the aerosols that cool global climate, like sulfur dioxide, did not scale with the volume of rock ejected by the Toba eruption...
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