It was the closest event to an apocalypse in 2 million years.
The eruption of the Mount Toba supervolcano some 74,000 years ago choked the planet in a volcanic winter for as much as a decade, nearly wiping out humanity in its ash shadow.
Or no less than that is what we thought.
New evidence hidden beneath African soil, nearly 9,000 kilometers (about 5,600 miles) from the positioning of this colossal explosion, reveals a special story – one by which Toba went on a deadly rampage, but in some way humans survived and even thrived at the hours of darkness face of super- eruption.
When the Indonesian supervolcano blew its top, covering about 2,800 cubic kilometers (670 cubic miles) of the encompassing area in volcanic ash, it spewed even further its other, almost invisible guts: cryptotephras (microscopic pieces of glass) pumped into the atmosphere that drift endlessly within the wind before settling all the way down to the surface.
Nearly 75,000 years later, under a microscope, one such shiny piece caught the eye of geoarchaeologist Panagiotis Karkanas of the American School of Classical Studies in Greece as he sifted through sediment taken from the Pinnacle Point 5–6 archaeological site, situated along the southern coast of South Africa.
“I studied one shard among millions of other mineral particles,” Karkanas says.
“But it was there and it couldn’t have been anything else.”
Subsequent evaluation of the chemical signature of the fragment – and one other fragment discovered 9 kilometers away – confirmed that each got here from a supereruption.
But that is not all of the team found.
While digging, the team also discovered stone artifacts, bones and other cultural stays of the land’s ancient African inhabitants, meticulously analyzing every inch of the 1.5-meter vertical column of rock layer.
Surprisingly, archaeological evidence suggests that the epic Toba eruption didn’t disrupt the lives of those people, no less than to the extent that we are able to recognize their long-ago traces left in the bottom.
“These models tell us so much about how people lived on this place and the way their activities modified over time,” explains one in all the researchers, Erich Fisher from Arizona State University.
“We found that during and after the Toba eruption, people had been living in this location at all times and there was no evidence that it had an impact on their daily lives.”
In any case, evidence of human activity in the world actually increased after the supereruption, in stark contrast to previous research that showed that the volcanic winter inside you brought humanity to the brink of extinction, and that years of ash-filled skies robbed our ancestors of sunlight and vegetation and – ultimately – life.
But given all the things we all know – or think we all know – concerning the devastating effects of a super-eruption, how was it possible to proceed to survive, let alone thrive?
This is just speculation, however the team believes that life on the coast is healthier – not only on the whole, but in addition by way of survival techniques in the traditional apocalypse.
The discovered samples – particularly the primary ever to point out Toba’s impact on human populations – come from coastal areas.
Therefore, scientists suggest that perhaps living on the coast, and its proximity to the ocean and its marine life, can have helped these ancient people survive the darkness of the deadly volcanic winter.
Elsewhere, separated from the ocean, other communities – even those 9,000 kilometers (or more) from Toba – may not have been so lucky.
Of course, that is only a hypothesis for now and never everyone agrees with it, but future research could help discover what really happened when Toba lost his temper so way back.
Thanks to some latest analytical techniques perfected by researchers here, it probably won’t be long before cryptotephra from inland archaeological sites reveal exactly what happened to the people living farther from the ocean – after which we’ll discover just how truly terrible Toba’s wrath was.
“This is a Holy Grail moment in geochronology,” one in all the team members, archaeologist Curtis W. Marean of Arizona State University, told The Atlantic.
“It’s extremely rare that we are able to speak about things in such a short lived resolution.”
The results are described in Nature.
