People survived the Toba supervolcano?s global winter after all

A supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago wasn’t enough to stop humanity in its tracks, artifacts at a Paleolithic site in central India suggest. But at the Dhaba site in Madhya Pradesh, India, archaeologists found stone tools in sediment layers spanning thousands of years before and after the eruption—evidence that human life went on.Today, the Toba supervolcano lies beneath the strikingly scenic Lake Toba on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Those layers are the key to answering an important question about Toba’s role in humanity’s story: did people arrive in India before the eruption, carrying the same stone-tool technology they had brought from Africa, or did they arrive tens of thousands of years afterward with more recently developed tool kits?According to luminescence dating of nearby sediments, the oldest stone tools at Dhaba are between 75,000 and 82,000 years old, pre-dating the Toba eruption by a few millennia. Overall, Dhaba seems to suggest that people arrived in central India before the Toba eruption, survived its aftermath, and stuck around—which doesn’t bode too well for the population bottleneck idea.The tools people were making and using at Dhaba in the millennia before the Toba eruption are strikingly similar to the tools found at sites in Africa starting around 280,000 years ago, in Arabia 100,000 to 74,000 years ago, and in northern Australia around 65,000 years ago (that timeline should look pretty familiar).