Image of Lake Toba courtesy of the Ministry of Culture & Tourism, Republic of Indonesia
Lake Toba is a spectacular body of water in Sumatra, Indonesia. At 1080 square miles, it's the largest lake in Indonesia.
The beauty of Lake Toba belies its murderous past - about 74,000 years in the past, the volcano that shaped Lake Toba erupted in a massive explosion that created a "volcanic winter" event that may have precipitated the near-extinction of the human race.
The surprising lack of diversity in genetic profiles across the global population suggests that at one time in our past, all the humans in the world were reduced to about 1,000 breeding pairs, from which we are all descended. The Toba super-eruption is believed to be the event that decimated humanity to those dangerously low numbers, a pattern that seems to fit other primate species as well.
There's little trace of the explosion in today's Lake Toba, a beautiful (if hard to reach) spot in Sumatra that welcomes all the descendants of the species it almost exterminated more than 70,000 years ago.
For more on this deceptively beautiful spot in Sumatra, read our article: Lake Toba.
Danah Toba is indeed one of my favorite spots on Earth–it is amazing such a cataclysm would turn into such a laid back place!