In the last 2 million years of planet Earth, several super-eruptions have shaped it to its present form. The Toba super-eruption in present day Sumatra, Indonesia, that took place around 74,000 years ago, is the most massive one of these and to date, is considered to be a global catastrophe at the time. That, however, might not entirely be true, as suggested by some new found tools from the time.
Archaeologists have discovered an old stone tool industry at Dhaba in northern India that was used by the population in the area at the time. The interesting part is that the stone tools found are ¡°unchanging¡± in nature from before and after the Toba super-eruption. This has led archaeologists to believe that humans had somehow survived the impact of the Toba super-explosion.
"The fact that these toolkits did not disappear at the time of the Toba super-eruption or change dramatically soon after indicates that human populations survived the so-called catastrophe and continued to create tools to modify their environments," explains archaeologist Chris Clarkson from the University of Queensland.
Dhaba locality was situated on the banks of the Middle Son River in Madhya Pradesh, northern India. Humans were present in the Middle Son Valley for roughly 80,000 years spanning both before and after the Toba eruption.
Right around the time of the Toba super-eruption, a major drop in the genetic diversity of humans was observed. This led many to believe that the volcanic eruption was the main reason behind this, having wiped out the majority of the population at the time. Some even believed that the eruption had led to a decade-long volcanic winter.
The popular notion could not hold for long as further excavations across different parts revealed stone tools belonging to the time. Some argued that the tools did not belong to the homo sapiens and instead, represent the same make as that of the tools used by the Neanderthals. Regardless of whom they belonged to, the tools confirm one fact - the makers of these not only survived the eruption, they were thriving at the time.
The new-found tools in India are a part of other such findings from the time discovered over the years. These findings have further confirmed that the Toba super-eruption did not have any major impact on the homo sapiens thriving in the locality at the time. So how did they go through a bottleneck in their genetic diversity?
A simple explanation for this can be that the humans branched into smaller groups as they spread across Eurasia. This led to a diminishing genetic diversity. The new-found tools even help support this theory, by acting as the missing links of the movement of homo sapiens at the time.
That is because the makes of these tools match with those found in other regions including Africa, Arabia and even Australia from the early stone age. The early migration can hence be deduced to have taken place from Africa to southeast Asia and further to the great south land.
"Modern human dispersal out of Africa, and more importantly east of Arabia, must therefore have taken place before [65,000 years ago]," the authors write, adding ¡°the Dhaba locality serves as an important bridge linking regions with similar archaeology to the east and west."
That being said, we know that the civilisation at the time did not contribute much to the present day gene pool so something did act as a challenge to their existence. Just not the volcano.