<a href="http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13332" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13332</a><p>Here's a link to the actual paper, the times article read more like a footnote.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory</a><p>Toba is another one that <i>may</i> have caused the population bottleneck ~50k YBP.<p>One thing to learn from these various events is that our lives and civilizations are very fragile in the short-term, but that humans as a species are amazingly resilient. At least, I hope so, survivorship and whatnot.