Lake Toba (Image: Ryan Ramly, Wikimedia Commons)
IN THE face of global climate change 74,000 years ago, humans came up trumps. Evidence from India shows that the global cooling following a massive volcanic eruption at the time did not decimate human populations as originally thought.
The eruption of Toba volcano in Sumatra, Indonesia – the largest of the past 2 million years – coincided with the onset of glacial conditions. This has led some people to link the two events, says Michael Petraglia of the University of Cambridge. Some have proposed that human populations shrank during the “volcanic winter”…
