Some scientists have argued that the winter conditions this would have induced could have posed an immense challenge to early humans and have pointed to some genetic studies that indicated our ancestors likely experienced a dramatic drop in numbers - a population "bottleneck" - around the time of the eruption.

BBC: Toba super-volcano catastrophe idea 'dismissed'

There were slots above me on the career ladder, like field producer and senior producer, but there was a bottleneck that was unlikely to open up for a long time.

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"The risk of orchestrated systems--and the reason that we're all trying to move toward more choreography--is that you can get a bottleneck if the traffic cop can only handle so much traffic at one time, " says Page.

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