Amusing political advertisement (NSFW!)

[ka9q]

I think the single biggest event in human times (the past several hundred thousand years) was the eruption of the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia about 75,000 years ago. According to the Toba catastrophe theory (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) as few as 1,000-10,000 breeding pairs were left and we could easily have gone extinct. The outcome depended strongly on the timing of the eruption and the wind patterns at the time.

We're all descended from Toba survivors. They created a genetic "bottleneck" that explains why humans have so little genetic variation for a species of our age.

[gillianren]

Once the Treaty of Versailles was ratified, World War II was pretty well inevitable, in my opinion.

I agree. It carried lessons for the future that I don't think have been well understood.

Alas, you're quite right.  I believe it is in Busman's Honeymoon that Dorothy L. Sayers mentions the Allies' being able to whistle for their reparations, because Germany didn't have the money.  And she was writing in the '30s--in the book before, a character was actually able to say unironically that "what this country needs is a 'Itler."