As a species we've all been pretty much along for the ride - the Toba Eruption being but one example.
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When Krakatau erupted in 1883, the huge volume of ash that was shot into the stratosphere blocked sunlight, and global average temperatures dropped by about 2° to 4°F for more than a year. Weather patterns were erratic for years, and temperatures did not return to normal until 1888. The sky was dimmed, even darkened, for months after the eruption, and the large amount of particulate matter in the stratosphere changed its color, producing, for instance, spectacular orange-red sunsets, such as the one depicted in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893). As Munch wrote in his diary on January 22, 1892: “Suddenly the sky turned blood red. . . . I stood there shaking with fear and felt an endless scream passing through nature.” Rare atmospheric effects, including a literal blue moon, a Bishop’s ring (a faint brown halo around the sun), and volcanic purple light at twilight, were also seen around the world.
Sixty-eight years earlier, when Mount Tambora (also in Indonesia) had erupted in 1815, it injected so much dust into the stratosphere that the earth’s weather patterns changed. As the ash blocked sunlight, the resulting cooling led to crop failures, starvation of livestock, and widespread disease (including a typhus epidemic) and famine in human populations around the world. The following “Year without a Summer” (1816) saw cold, dark, rainy summer months in North America and Eurasia: even in June, it snowed in New York, New England, and many European cities. That month, Percy and Mary Shelley were staying at Lord Byron’s villa near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, and they told one another gothic horror stories to pass the long hours spent indoors. That wet, gloomy summer inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.
The eruption of Toba about 74,000 years ago was 1,000 times as large as that of Tambora or Krakatau. It didn’t just trigger a summerless year or a short cold spell spanning several years: global temperatures dropped by 5° to 9°F, to a worldwide average of just 60°F after three years, and took a full decade to recover to pre-eruption levels. The tree line and the snow line fell to 10,000 feet lower than where they are today, making most high elevations uninhabitable. Ice cores from Greenland show the evidence of this dramatic cooling in trapped ash and ancient air bubbles.
What happened to people and animals during this terrible time? As we shall see in the rest of this book, many geneticists and archaeologists believe that the Toba catastrophe nearly wiped out the human race; afterward, they argue, only about 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs of people survived worldwide. Supporting this idea are both geologic evidence of Toba’s size and atmospheric effects and indications of a human genetic bottleneck that happened around the time of the eruption. A genetic bottleneck occurs when the number of individuals in a population drops so low that its genetic diversity is greatly reduced, and all descendants of that population carry the rare genes of the handful of survivors. Several studies have found similarly timed bottlenecks in the genes of human lice and of our gut bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which causes ulcers; according to these organisms’ molecular clocks, which show how much time has passed since a genetic change took place, both bottlenecks date back to the time of Toba. The molecular clocks of a number of other animals, including tigers and pandas, indicate that they, too, passed through a bottleneck around that time. In short, Toba was the biggest eruption since modern humans appeared on earth, and it came very close to wiping out people, along with many other animals, altogether.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-books/2025/01/24/how-the-largest-volcanic-eruption-in-human-history-changed-the-world/
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