Tools embedded in dirt from huge volcanic eruption 74k years ago discovered

[FfFfFfFF 58,120]

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 Petraglia, a study co-author and archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

These new excavations back up the growing evidence that the Sumatra eruption wasn’t as life-threatening as scientists used to believe. And the tools themselves look similar to what early Homo sapiens were producing in Africa — which could indicate that humans in India moved into the continent earlier than some anthropologists think.

Several years ago, other researchers digging in the Middle Son Valley identified ash from the Sumatra volcano. When looking at a crosscut of the land, the deposit is visible from afar, Petraglia says: It’s a white strip running through reddish brown sediment. This north-central region in India is also rich in fossils and other remains.

 

The tools discovered:

 

Source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/when-a-supervolcano-erupted-these-ancient-people-survived-the-blankets-of

[Eighteen 5,430]

you made a mistake on the date in the thread title