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Imagine a year in Africa when summer never arrives. The sky takes on a gray hue during the day and glows red at night. Flowers do not bloom. Trees die in the winter. Large mammals like antelope become thin, starve and provide little fat to the predators (carnivores and human hunters) that depend on them.
Then, this same disheartening cycle repeats itself, year after year. This is a picture of life on earth after the eruption of super-volcano Mount Toba in Indonesia about 74,000 years ago. In a paper published this week, scientists show that early modern humans on the coast of South Africa thrived through this event. The effect of the Toba eruption would have certainly impacted some ecosystems more than others, possibly creating areas, or refugia, in which some human groups did better than others throughout the event. Whether or not your group lived in such a refuge would have largely depended on the type of resources available.Image credit: Curtis Marean/Arizona State University
