Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct - why didn't we, and how can we survive the next [current]cataclysm

SHOOT: By getting smarter. Google might help, but it depends whether you're using google to search for porn or swine flu, Erin Andrews' nude video or James Howard Kunstler. It depends on whether you're a gamer or a gardener. Some of it is a no-brainer. But while technology can enable [and in some cases disable] our potentila to be smart, no computer [nor the technology it fires around] can work without the lights on. Think of an incredible Porsche or Ferrari with no petrol. In that sense we need to be subtle in how smart we are, and of course, we're not. Sheep don't understand subtlety, just load barking, and our consensus trance is distinctly sheepish.

clipped from www.theatlantic.com Seventy-four thousand years ago, humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what’s now Lake Toba, in Sumatra, erupted with a strength more than a thousand times that of Mount St. Helens in 1980. Some 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the skies of the Northern Hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge. Some scientists speculate that as the Earth went into a deep freeze, the population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to as low as a few thousand families. The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.