[Berlin_Freeper]

There was a volcano eruption 70,000 years ago that reduced the world population to 1,000 people.

[djf]

Yup.

And there was an ice age after that event that lasted for 1,000 years.

The Toba supervolcano.

[Little Bill]

As much as I like Blam, I do not think this was the case. I also do not believe in the African retreat of a 100k years ago.

[blam]

Late Pleostocene Human Population Bottlenecks. . . (Toba)

"The last glacial period was preceded by 1000 years of the coldest temperatures of the Late Pleistocene, apparently caused by the eruption of the Mount Toba volcano. The six year long volcanic winter and 1000-year-long instant Ice Age that followed Mount Toba's eruption may have decimated Modern Man's entire population. Genetic evidence suggests that Human population size fell to about 10,000 adults between 50 and 100 thousand years ago. The survivors from this global catastrophy would have found refuge in isolated tropical pockets, mainly in Equatorial Africa. Populations living in Europe and northern China would have been completely eliminated by the reduction of the summer temperatures by as much as 12 degrees centigrade. "

[gleeaikin]

The volcano you refer to was about 73 or 74,000 years ago and the figure I heard was about 10,000 people. A more interesting fact is that one of the major Yellowstone caldera eruptions occurred about 2.3 million years ago. Perhaps between that event and the one described in this article, it wiped out most of the early hominids like australopithecus and bumped the evolutionary lottery that led to homo erectus, and homo habilis.