Apocalypse not –
Previous studies suggest volcanic winter caused a population bottleneck , 0 years ago.
An ancient apocalypse?
Fossil evidence suggests that people had reached the Levant by around , (0 years ago, the Arabian Peninsula by around 100, 06 0 years ago, and northern Australia by around , 08 0 years ago. But the genomes of modern people suggest that the ancestors of modern African and non-African peoples branched off from a common ancestor around , 0 years ago. At first glance, those lines of evidence don’t seem to agree, and some paleoanthropologists say that’s because a sudden, lengthy period of global cooling changed environments around the world in very drastic ways. The resulting crisis allegedly killed off most of the people alive at the time, leaving only a few thousand survivors.
appear above and below the Toba ash layer in lake sediments from Lake Malawi in East Africa, which suggests that conditions did not change enough to disrupt life. And the archaeological evidence from Dhaba suggests that people in India weren’t dying off in droves, either. In fact, the layers of sediment just above the Toba ash layer contain as many artifacts as those just below it.
Layers of sediment at Dhaba span
, (0 years of human occupation.) Christina Nuedorf Adapt and survive At Dhaba, near the banks of the Son River in central India, you can trace the development of stone-tool technology by looking at the artifacts buried, layer by layer, in 100, 06 0 years’ worth of accumulated sediment. 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’d 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 79, (0 and) , 0 years old, pre-dating the Toba eruption by a few millennia. And on the other side of the layer of tuff deposited by Toba (which argon isotope dating puts at , (0 to) , 0 years old, the same stone tools keep showing up, uninterrupted by anything that looks like a sudden apocalyptic depopulation. They persist for another 74, 06 0 years before gradually giving way to a different stone tool technology which involves much smaller “microblades” a few centimeters long. 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 200, 0 years ago, in Arabia 400, 06 0 to 80, 06 0 years ago, and in northern Australia around , 0 years ago (that timeline should look pretty familiar). They’re sharp flakes, blades, and scrapers made by knapping pieces off prepared stone cores — a technology archaeologists call Levallois. That puts India firmly in the timeline of human migration as “an important bridge linking regions with similar archeology to the east and west.”
Of course, it’s likely that conditions at Dhaba changed for at least a few years after the eruption — a study of ancient pollen grains suggests that there was some deforestation in Southern Asia at that time. But adapting to changing climates and new landscapes has always been a human strong point, and that’s what the archaeological record at Dhaba shows: not that nothing changed, but that people probably adapted, coped, and kept going.
Nature Communications, DOI: . / s – 34 – 01575879 – 4 ( About DOIs ).
Read More) ()
Layers of sediment at Dhaba span
, (0 years of human occupation.) Christina Nuedorf Adapt and survive At Dhaba, near the banks of the Son River in central India, you can trace the development of stone-tool technology by looking at the artifacts buried, layer by layer, in 100, 06 0 years’ worth of accumulated sediment. 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’d 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 79, (0 and) , 0 years old, pre-dating the Toba eruption by a few millennia. And on the other side of the layer of tuff deposited by Toba (which argon isotope dating puts at , (0 to) , 0 years old, the same stone tools keep showing up, uninterrupted by anything that looks like a sudden apocalyptic depopulation. They persist for another 74, 06 0 years before gradually giving way to a different stone tool technology which involves much smaller “microblades” a few centimeters long. 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 200, 0 years ago, in Arabia 400, 06 0 to 80, 06 0 years ago, and in northern Australia around , 0 years ago (that timeline should look pretty familiar). They’re sharp flakes, blades, and scrapers made by knapping pieces off prepared stone cores — a technology archaeologists call Levallois. That puts India firmly in the timeline of human migration as “an important bridge linking regions with similar archeology to the east and west.”
Of course, it’s likely that conditions at Dhaba changed for at least a few years after the eruption — a study of ancient pollen grains suggests that there was some deforestation in Southern Asia at that time. But adapting to changing climates and new landscapes has always been a human strong point, and that’s what the archaeological record at Dhaba shows: not that nothing changed, but that people probably adapted, coped, and kept going.
Nature Communications, DOI: . / s – 34 – 01575879 – 4 ( About DOIs ).
Read More) ()
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 200, 0 years ago, in Arabia 400, 06 0 to 80, 06 0 years ago, and in northern Australia around , 0 years ago (that timeline should look pretty familiar). They’re sharp flakes, blades, and scrapers made by knapping pieces off prepared stone cores — a technology archaeologists call Levallois. That puts India firmly in the timeline of human migration as “an important bridge linking regions with similar archeology to the east and west.”
Of course, it’s likely that conditions at Dhaba changed for at least a few years after the eruption — a study of ancient pollen grains suggests that there was some deforestation in Southern Asia at that time. But adapting to changing climates and new landscapes has always been a human strong point, and that’s what the archaeological record at Dhaba shows: not that nothing changed, but that people probably adapted, coped, and kept going.
Nature Communications,
Read More) (
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