The largest volcanic catastrophe during the evolution of humans formed the huge caldera at Lake Toba near the Equator in Sumatra about 70 thousand years ago. Explosive action erupted 2800 cubic kilometres of magma, of which 800 km³ was deposited as thick ash across most of South Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. Sulfates derived from the gas emissions by Toba form clear ‘spikes’ in ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. Its effects were global through the mixing of sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere of both hemispheres, encouraged by its position close to the Equator. By reflecting incoming solar energy the aerosols resulted in a century-long 10°C fall in temperature over the Greenland ice cap. Such global cooling almost certainly affected anatomically modern humans, but it is possible that in South Asia Toba had an even more devastating effect.

At several sites in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in Malaysia Toba ash has buried artifacts that arguably may have been made by the earliest modern emigrants from Africa. Immediately above the ash are yet more tools that suggest humans did survive the eruption. Palaeoanthropologists have argued that the stress of Toba’s environmental effects on all hominins living at the time may have resulted in population crashes from which only the fittest individuals emerged. Major evolutionary changes have been ascribed to ‘bottlenecks’ of that kind to result in changes in human behaviour detectable from the archaeological record, such as the creation of completely new kinds of tools, art and language.  However, recent finds in Africa suggest that many such shifts are much older than Toba.

Perhaps Toba’s greatest contribution to palaeoanthropology is that it is an easily recognised event in the geological record, but compared with its sulfate spike in the Greenland ice core at ~71 ka the existing radiometric dates have uncertainties of several thousand years. Using the latest ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating methods on fresh crystals of sanidine (volcanic K-feldspar) from new excavations in Malaysia these uncertainties have been reduced significantly (Storey, M. et al. 2012. Astronomically calibrated ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar age for the Toba supereruption and global synchronization of late Quaternary records. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 109, p. 19684-18688 ). The sulfate peak and the ash can now be attributed to an age of 73.88 ± 0.32 ka; better than a golden spike in Late Pleistocene stratigraphy. The ice-cores have a check on chronology just beyond the limit of counting annual layering, as do ocean sediment cores for a time older than ¹⁴C can ever achieve. Toba now links too with events recorded by the precise U-Th series dating of cave deposits

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