So This Is How It All Ends?

Massive volcano 'wiped out the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago'

European Neanderthals may have been wiped out by a catastrophic volcanic eruption over 40,000 years ago, according to new research.

A new study says that a massive explosion caused the onset of a 'volcanic winter' that devastated their population.

Researchers led by Liubov Golovanova of Russia's ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg report that volcanic dust deposits found in a cave in the Caucasus show that an ecological disaster was responsible.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

Read the article for more info.

But I'm curious which volcano they are talking about, because they don't really say.

Scenario: Massive volcano like this one erupts on a scale not seen before (Maybe VEI 7 or 8), and causes worldwide nuclear winter. In turn, a whole cascade of events follows including worldwide food shortages, descent into chaos, and death on a massive scale.

Now with all the big active volcanoes on the earth, this scenario to me seems about one of the most plausible- other than maybe an undiscovered asteroid slamming us...

And that volcano has been showing recent signs of seismic activity...

But I dunno, maybe it would take one as big as Yellowstone to really induce that kind of damage. Anywhere one erupts though, the SIZE of the eruption is critical. And that's where the unknowns are particularly dangerous.

I don't have anything of interest to add but I'll comment to give it a bump because it's a good post! Thanks for posting! S&F

I thought it was a giant asteroid?
Or global warming?
Or an Ice Age?
Or a virus?
Or pole shift?
Or radiatino from the sun?
Or... maybe we simply don't know sh*t.

Originally posted by TrueAmerican
Massive volcano 'wiped out the Neanderthals 40,000 years ago'

European Neanderthals may have been wiped out by a catastrophic volcanic eruption over 40,000 years ago, according to new research.

A new study says that a massive explosion caused the onset of a 'volcanic winter' that devastated their population.

Researchers led by Liubov Golovanova of Russia's ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg report that volcanic dust deposits found in a cave in the Caucasus show that an ecological disaster was responsible.

www.dailymail.co.uk...

Read the article for more info.

But I'm curious which volcano they are talking about, because they don't really say.

Scenario: Massive volcano like this one erupts on a scale not seen before (Maybe VEI 7 or 8), and causes worldwide nuclear winter. In turn, a whole cascade of events follows including worldwide food shortages, descent into chaos, and death on a massive scale.

Now with all the big active volcanoes on the earth, this scenario to me seems about one of the most plausible- other than maybe an undiscovered asteroid slamming us...

And that volcano has been showing recent signs of seismic activity...

But I dunno, maybe it would take one as big as Yellowstone to really induce that kind of damage. Anywhere one erupts though, the SIZE of the eruption is critical. And that's where the unknowns are particularly dangerous.

There's at least a few super-volcanoes (or calderas) that exploded over the distant past and most of the sites are still uncertain, but still proven by science. But the Yellowstone caldera was the site of at least one super-eruption... some scientists think it's what caused the last ice-age, so that's perhaps this one.

And yeah, it can get THAT bad with a super-volcano eruption. Talk about an effect similar to a global nuclear war, without the radioactive fallout (even though the toxic dust fallout does a lot of damage for a while, but not for centuries, or millenias).

LOL, these guys can never make their mind up.

They said on the News here in Norway 2 years ago that : A study shows the 'we', our current monkey state of evolution, wiped out the Neanderthal man... Makes sense when there are neanderthalman skulls with bulletholes in them in the Museum of London, If Im not mistaking...

Nah, who cares any more, the lies are so entwined that it is impossible to figure any thing out...

What COULDN'T wipe us out and make it all end? Like mecheng said, there's any number of possibilities that could make us disappear. It's more of a mystery that we do exist than how we will become exterminated in my mind. Maybe it's something that we haven't even discovered that will destroy us, our way of life, our knowledge and our mere existence. We're like preschoolers within the universe, just making our way through the schooling system of the known, and possibly what some only want to be known, with the greatest library of the universe yet to be found or revealed. We're probably infants in a universe of post doctoral knowledge spanning unimaginable amounts of time that simply isn't privileged to us for a variety of reasons or possibly even excuses. Eons of history may await us at some juncture with an understanding of unfathomable proportions and even consequences. We probably won't know until it's too late to know as far as the cause of the end of our existence though.

I may have gone off on a bit of a tangent there, I'm good like that, but I'm also in a funky mood.

Who knows?

Originally posted by mecheng
I thought it was a giant asteroid?
Or global warming?
Or an Ice Age?
Or a virus?
Or pole shift?
Or radiation from the sun?

Well, there certainly is a variety of ways the planet could get hammered, with most if not all of the life being destroyed on it. We're pretty smart, but there still isn't a whole lot we could do about a gamma ray burst or stray asteroid slamming us. And call me pessimistic, but I don't think Superman or any other friendly aliens are going to show up to save us if that happens.

There are a lot of people who look at space and are absolutely convinced that there are probably other "people" out there, but when you think about how hard it probably is for life to pop up, and how easy it is for it to be destroyed, it certainly takes some of the edge off that "probably."

People on this thread are assuming it's one single event that ended them when it could have been a large variety of events, most of which we have evidence for.

Remember, we survived a god damn supervolcano, I think it takes a bit more of mother nature to fully take us out.

Originally posted by hippomchippo
People on this thread are assuming it's one single event that ended them when it could have been a large variety of events, most of which we have evidence for.

I believe if you'll read the OP again, I said a chain of events...

What if that chain of events led to such desperation and starvation, lack of medicine, vast famine, loss of electricity and other things among world countries that nuclear war ensued? That's a threat the Neanderthals never had to deal with.

This article suggests three separate eruptions at about the same time

Chemical analyses of soil layers in the Russian cave identified two types of volcanic ash denoting separate volcanic eruptions in western Asia between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago. Plant pollen recovered in the cave indicates that extremely cold, dry conditions prevailed around the time these ash layers formed.

Other researchers, led by anthropologist Francesco Fedele of the University of Naples in Italy, have recently reported evidence of an unusually large volcanic eruption in Italy around 40,000 years ago. That event created a "volcanic winter" that devastated the ecology of southern and eastern Europe, in their view.

Discovery News

Scary reading, the question is if mankind will be able to stop this kind of eruptions? and when will it happend? think I need something else to think about now for a while, because I can't sleep