WI: No Toba Bottleneck

I've been curious as to what would happen to human populations if there had been no "Bottleneck" as is believed to have been caused by the Toba volcanic eruption.

Would we see Asiatic Europeans? Dark-skinned Asians (and eventually Native Americans?) Red-skinned Africans and Middle Easterners?
 

NothingNow

Banned
I hate to say this, but we can't figure any of that out.

More genetic variety and robust-ness is guaranteed, but that's more or less all we can determine.

Maybe Blue hair, Red- and Grey-eyes, but that's more or less from random chance. You really can't predict what traits are going to pop up where, beyond that people in more northerly locales will be paler, Sickle cell anemia will be endemic in countries with Malaria, and that's about it.
 
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I've been curious as to what would happen to human populations if there had been no "Bottleneck" as is believed to have been caused by the Toba volcanic eruption.

Would we see Asiatic Europeans? Dark-skinned Asians (and eventually Native Americans?) Red-skinned Africans and Middle Easterners?

Pretty sure the European and other looks developed after Toba in response to environmental pressures that will remain.

I sometimes muse on the way behaviorally modern humanity took off after Toba. I suspect the bottleneck concentrated genes that favor adaptability and creativity in the the genepool. Or some kind of...mental modelling ability, the way we plan and reason out new things. Boosted us over some treshold.

In other words, without Toba we may we have spent the last 70 000 years in the same way we spent the 70 000 before that.
 
In other words, without Toba we may we have spent the last 70 000 years in the same way we spent the 70 000 before that.

There is perhaps something to be said for that, but it's worth noting that the "70 000 before that" were not in any sense a static period. Compared to the previous million years it was a period of unprecedented change and technological development. Now, perhaps we can argue that without
Toba things merely continue at the same pace, but with the much larger population I suspect we'd still be stumbling into a pseudo-Neolithic by now.

As for the resulting racial characteristics, to my knowledge the first Homo sapiens were almost entirely in Africa at the time, possibly heading toward the Middle East. If they expand as they did in OTL, you'll still see pygmies in the Congo, !San(ish) peoples in southern Africa, straighter hair and lighter skin from Britain to Japan, and short people with rounded faces and reduced facial hair in the Arctic.

What's likely to change is more a question of cosmetics. Perhaps no light-haired trait ever develops. Perhaps it develops in Siberia and is carried across East Asia when the proto-Asiatics push out the proto-Australoids (probably not using the right anthropology terms there). Or perhaps the Siberian invasion of OTL never happens, and "Asians" all look like the OTL Ainu.

One thought: It's likely that Toba was nearly as detrimental, or even more so, to the other Old World hominids alive at the time. There's a case to be made that it cleared the field by eliminating populations and that the most advantaged race (Or the most southerly, perhaps?) had the advantage of moving into empty or lightly populated territory. Sans Toba they'd be actively competing with more entrenched populations.
 

wwalter

It is very hard to predict how an event that occurred before the Neolithic Revolution (c. 8000 BC) will effect the present. I think it is important to keep in mind that the relative frequency of any trait is going to be most strongly influenced by the reproductive success of those carrying it. So even if there were more genetic variation amongst mankind 70,000 years ago, there is no guarantee that it would be strongly reflected amongst mankind today. Taking the Earth's landmasses as a given, I think it is all but certain that a relatively small number of ethnic groups will predominate, while others will remain obscure, ensuring that certain genetic traits remain uncommon. Were it not for adventurous Norsemen, the redheads might be even less common today!

That being said, whatever tribe or group is first to stake claim to the Nile River Valley, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus River Valley, or the Yellow River will probably see their traits quite well represented in the present world population, whereas the first band of humans to settle in Europe might see their descendants mostly confined to the Pyrenees.
 
That being said, whatever tribe or group is first to stake claim to the Nile River Valley, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus River Valley, or the Yellow River will probably see their traits quite well represented in the present world population, whereas the first band of humans to settle in Europe might see their descendants mostly confined to the Pyrenees.

While roughly I agree, I'd change it slightly to whatever agricultural tribe or group is first to stake claim. The Han weren't the first people on the Yellow River by any means, and had long ago displaced relatives of the Ainu and Australian Aborigines.

And to that I would also add whichever group first domesticates the horse is going to spread its skin tone and any unique traits like colored hair or epicanthic folds. Not as successfully as it will spread its language and culture, say, but spread it will.

The same will happen in central, east, and southern Africa as well for whoever first breeds a cow resistant to the tse-tse.
 
While roughly I agree, I'd change it slightly to whatever agricultural tribe or group is first to stake claim. The Han weren't the first people on the Yellow River by any means, and had long ago displaced relatives of the Ainu and Australian Aborigines.

And to that I would also add whichever group first domesticates the horse is going to spread its skin tone and any unique traits like colored hair or epicanthic folds. Not as successfully as it will spread its language and culture, say, but spread it will.

The same will happen in central, east, and southern Africa as well for whoever first breeds a cow resistant to the tse-tse.

The so called "Han Chinese" is actually a thousands-of-years amalgamation of numerous tribes around the "Yellow River" and areas beyond.

After the Han dynasty was founded, they started to develop their own unique ethnic identity.

All the "ethnic groups" in our modern world are also the same.

There is no such thing as an ethnic group that have been in an area without any cross breeding with the others.

That's why there are so many variations even within the same ethnic group.
 
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