The Toba supereruption, in what is now Indonesia, took place 74,000 years ago, and is the largest volcanic eruption of the past million yers. It ejected so much material that it blocked sunlight for years. Humans were spread through the world by then, but they left no documentation. Genetic studies hint that human population plunged around that time, but we don't yet have the evidence to ascribe their dwindling numbers to Toba. How could we get such evidence?
Jayde N. Hirniak is an anthropologist studying just that. The materials thrown from a volcano are known a tephra, and the kind of tephra that is thrown the furthest is cryptotephra. It's not called that because it is legendary, but because it is so small that it's hard to find. Cryptotephra is microscopic shards of glass. Its exact chemical makeup can identify which eruption it came from. Hirniak looks for cryptotephra at archaeological sites that may have been active during the Toba event. The archaeological evidence could tell us whether that society collapsed afterward, or moved away, or changed some other way. Read up on what this research has found so far at the Conversation. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: USGS Volcanic Hazards Program, CC BY 4.0)