The landscape after Pinatubo’s eruption may give a glimpse of what early humans experienced (Image: Sipa Press/Rex Features)

Gallery: Hit parade: The biggest bangs in history

THE first sign that something had gone terribly wrong was a deep rumbling roar. Hours later the choking ash arrived, falling like snow in a relentless storm that raged for over two weeks. Despite being more than 2000 kilometres from the eruption, hominins living as far away as eastern India would have felt Toba’s fury.

Toba is a supervolcano on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It has blown its top many times but this eruption, 74,000 years ago, was exceptional. Releasing 2500 cubic kilometres of magma – nearly twice the volume of mount Everest – the eruption was more than 5000 times as large as the 1980 eruption of mount St Helens in the US, making it the largest eruption on Earth in the last 2 million years (see “Blown away”).

The disaster is particularly significant since it occurred at a crucial period in human prehistory – when Neanderthals and other hominins roamed much of Asia and Europe, and around the time our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, were first leaving Africa to ultimately conquer the world. Yet with no recent eruptions for easy comparison, the full extent of its fallout and impact on early humans has been shrouded in mystery.

Now dramatic finds from archaeological digs in India, presented in February at a conference at the University of Oxford, are finally clarifying the picture of the eruption and its effects, and how it shaped human evolution and migration. Further results from the digs may …