It's not a car in space, but it is quite interesting. Any of my archaeologist followers want to comment ? I don't know anything about this besides what comes out of press releases.
The massive Toba volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 74,000 years ago did not cause a six-year-long "volcanic winter" in East Africa and thereby cause the human population in the region to plummet, according to new University of Arizona-led research.
Previous investigators found material from the Toba eruption in the Lake Malawi cores. That material pinpoints the time of the eruption and allowed Yost and colleagues to peer back in time 100 years before to 200 years after the Toba eruption. The team analyzed samples that represented, on average, every 8.5 years within that 300-year interval.
Yost and his colleagues did not find marked changes in lower-elevation vegetation post-eruption. The team did find some die-off of mountain plants just after the eruption. Cooling from the eruption might have injured frost-intolerant plants, he said. "It is surprising," Yost said. "You would have expected severe cooling based on the size of the Toba eruption—yet that's not what we see."
Co-author Andrew S. Cohen, UA Distinguished Professor of Geosciences, said, "That a singular event in Earth history 75,000 years ago caused human populations in the cradle of humankind to drop is not a tenable idea."
"We determined that the Toba eruption had no significant negative impact on vegetation growing in East Africa," Yost said. "We hope this will put the final nail in the coffin of the Toba catastrophe hypothesis."
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-volcanic-winter-east-africa-ancient.html
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