About 74,000 years ago, a volcano in Sumatra erupted, smothering its corner of the globe in debris and dust. The blast was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2 million years. For a long time, researchers thought its fallout would have wiped out most of the human life in the broader region — including modern-day India.
If the eruption had made life nearly impossible in early India, then records of human activity, like stone tools, would have transformed dramatically after the explosion as survivors adapted to their new conditions. But excavations in India show that the people who lived there during the eruption managed to keep going after the ash settled.
Stone tools embedded in dirt older than the eruption matched those found in deposits after the eruption, according to new research out in Nature Communications. “Those stone tools were identical — they didn’t change at all,” says Michael ...
