Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

The largest volcanic eruption on Earth in the last 2 million years may not have had the cataclysmic effects that some scientists have proposed, Cambridge-led research has revealed.

Some scenarios picture a drastic cooling of the Earth's climate - a 'Volcanic Winter' that may have severely reduced the human population.

However, an international research team including a number of Cambridge scholars has now discovered a series of stone tools at a site in southern India which suggest that a local population of modern humans remained in the region after the eruption.

Dr Michael Petraglia, of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, and colleagues found the artefacts in sedimentary layers sandwiching a layer of ash produced by the Toba eruption.

Although the tools show a slight evolution across the ash they are fairly similar, suggesting that the population of this area were present both before and after the event.

The suggestion that modern humans were in India at the time of the eruption also reinforces the notion that the current people of Eurasia followed a southern route of dispersal from the Horn of Africa 70,000 years ago.