All,
Stanley Ambrose’s views on the catastrophic impact of the Toba eruption (74,000 years ago), as well as earlier rebuttals, have already been brought up on the Forum (
HERE,
HERE, and
HERE).
And now comes a fairly clear, refreshing demonstration that, contrary to Ambrose’s thesis, life, biological and cultural, didn’t come to a stop – as it were – in the wake of the Toba eruption:
Petraglia, Michael, Ravi Korisettar, Nicole Boivin, Christopher Clarkson, Peter Ditchfield, Sacha Jones, Jinu Koshy, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Clive Oppenheimer, David Pyle, Richard Roberts, Jean-Luc Schwenninger, Lee Arnold, and Kevin White. 2007. Middle Paleolithic Assemblages from the Indian Subcontinent Before and After the Toba Super-Eruption. Science 114(317): 114-116.
Abstract:
The Youngest Toba Tuff (YTT) eruption, which occurred in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, is one of Earth’s largest known volcanic events. The effect of the YTT eruption on existing populations of humans, and accordingly on the course of human evolution, is debated. Here we associate the YTT with archaeological assemblages at Jwalapuram, in the Jurreru River valley of southern India. Broad continuity of Middle Paleolithic technology across the YTT event suggests that hominins persisted regionally across this major eruptive event.
… and the last lines of the conclusion:
We provide here firm chronological evidence that hominins were present in the Jurreru River valley, south India, immediately before and after the YTT eruption. Analyses of the archaeological industries recovered from the site indicate a strong element of technological continuity between the pre- and post-Toba assemblages. Together with the presence of faceted unidirectional and bidirectional bladelike core technology, these pre- and post-Toba industries suggest closer affinities to African Middle Stone Age traditions (such as Howieson’s Poort) than to contemporaneous Eurasian Middle Paleolithic ones that are typically based on discoidal and Levallois techniques (Fig. 3). The coincidence of (i) evidence of hominins flexible enough to exhibit continuity through a major eruptive event, (ii) technology more similar to the Middle Stone Age than the Middle Paleolithic, and (iii) overlap of the Jwalapuram artifact ages with the earlier end of the most commonly cited genetic coalescence dates (21–23) may suggest the presence of modern humans in India at the time of the YTT event. This interpretation would be consistent with a southern route of dispersal of modern humans from the Horn of Africa (24); the latter, however, will remain speculative until other Middle Paleolithic sites in the Indian subcontinent and Arabian Peninsula (25) are excavated and dated.
CLICK HERE for access to the paper, and make sure not to miss the “Supplementary information” which contains quite a bit of useful information, including a good plate of some of the lithics discussed in the paper.
Comments on the paper by John Hawks can also be found on his Blog (
HERE). He seems to be happy to see that this new geoarchaeological evidence can be used to refute Ambrose’s hypothesized dramatic and lengthy bottleneck.
You can also have a look the National Geographic piece (
HERE) which would be fairly straightforward if it weren’t for the fact that the author’s – one Anne Casselman – introductory sentence shows very clearly that she knows zilch about lithic technology.
Jacques
