Great Catastrophe
- "The earth shook for days, the fires burned for weeks, and when the ash had settled, less than ten thousand of your kind still lived, and far fewer of ours. But we carried on, together..."
- ―Jupiter to Desmond in the Synch Nexus[src]
The Toba catastrophe was an event during pre-history which nearly eradicated both Humanity and the First Civilization.
The Catastrophe was as a planet-wide scorching that originated from the Sun.[1][2] The polarity of the Earth's magnetic field was flipped by an coronal mass ejection, or solar flare, from the Sun, which exposed humans and Those Who Came Before to deadly radiation.[1]
Earthquakes continued for days, while worldwide blazes raged for several weeks.[3]
Less than ten thousand humans and "far fewer" members of the First Civilization survived the catastrophe, while the surface of the earth was rendered barren.[3] This incident, rather than the eruption of a supervolcano, was the true nature of the Toba catastrophe and subsequent mass extinction.[2] In order to recover from the event, the remaining members of the First Civilization worked with humanity to restore life to the planet.[3]
Because their numbers were too few, Those Who Came Before would fail to live on long after The Catastrophe. Humans were built to survive and thus were more capable of rebuilding a new civilization. Over time, the regrowth of the earth's landscape and geography would eliminate nearly all physical evidence of Those Who Came Before.[4]
As time continued, after the Catastrophe, mankind declared that Those Who Came Before were supernatural in origin. The only evidence of the truth of The First Civilization are the underground vaults that were built in anticipation of a second planetary catastrophe.
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