Jwalapuram: Stories Buried in Ash

Buried in the small village of Jwalapuram in the Kurnool District of Andhra Pradesh are priceless clues about India’s earliest humans.

Anthropologists are still divided about the origins of our race - the Homo sapiens. When did they start their migrations and did they all really come out of Africa in one go? Since the 1990s, there has been an overwhelming body of work around this. One of the theories was that all modern-day humans, originated from East Africa’s Rift Valley, and they left Africa in 2 waves between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. The ‘Out of Africa’ theory was reinforced by research done by scientists Allan Wilson (University of California) and Rebecca Cann (University of Hawaii) who suggested that modern humans are descendants of a single group of Homo sapiens who moved out of Africa and they took the long route to traverse the known continents and settle along the coast, in the second wave. Based on this , it was further believed that the first humans would have reached India approximately 50,000 years ago.

– It was initially believed that that the first Humans reached India after the second wave of migration out of Africa around 50,000 yrs ago

In 2007, Ravi Korisettar, a well-known Indian archaeologist working with a team of international and local archaeologists, including Michael Petraglia (Professor of Human Evolution at the University of Oxford) excavated the site of Jwalapuram, in Andhra Pradesh. What they found was one of the most significant clues to the understanding of our evolution. While excavating they came across huge amounts of ash, some of it as much as two meters deep. The ash deposits were of an ancient volcanic eruption at Mt. Toba.

About 74,000 years ago a supervolcano erupted at Mt. Toba, on the modern-day island of Sumatra, Indonesia that had a catastrophic impact across the region. One of the largest volcanic events to have occurred on earth in the past two million years, this volcano, the last in a series of 4, was 100 times larger than any volcano ever seen till date. So large was this eruption that the volcano was active for about 10 years and it took another 10,000 years for the volcano to cool down!

– The Toba volcano was active for about 10 years and it took another 10,000 years to cool down

During the period when the volcano was active, strong winds spread the volcanic ash Mt Toba threw up, over a large region covering the Indian Subcontinent. The ash began raining down and fell upon oceans as distant as the South China Sea in the east to the Arabian Sea in the west. The tuff or the debris from the volcano, scientists believe would have blocked the sun, darkened the skies and affected rainfall for a period of 10 years, creating what they call a ‘volcanic winter’.

The impact of Toba’s outburst was felt in Jwalapuram, in present day Andhra Pradesh too. In fact excavations have shown that a large part of the Indian Subcontinent was covered in 1-3 m volcanic ash through this period.

But the really big discovery wasn’t just the finding and dating of the ash. Just above this huge layer of ash were hundreds of different types of stone tools made by ancient humans. And, shockingly, underneath the 74,000 year-old layer were hundreds of other such stone tools. This meant that humans were already present in India all those years ago when the Toba eruption occurred. According to the archaeologist excavating, the artefacts were remarkably similar to those that have been discovered and dated back roughly to this period in southern Africa, where the only toolmakers were Homo sapiens.

Michael Petraglia's article in Nature, international journal of Science suggests that

‘It were modern humans - rather than other earlier human species - that lived in the Indian subcontinent. The Indian stone tools look a lot like those from African Middle Stone Age about 100,000 years ago, when modern humans were thought to have lived’

Understandably, when this theory was proposed in 2007, there was quite a furore in history circles leading to a fair bit of debate. Till then it was generally believed that modern day humans reached India, from Africa much later.

There was a lot else the excavations threw up and it simply iterated the fact that there was continuous habitation of this area from much earlier.

Over the years many other excavations have thrown up similar findings, questioning the earlier believed notions. Recently, in June 2017, archaeologists in Morocco excavated a skull of a modern human or Homo Sapiens at the cave of Jebel Irhoud dating back around 300,000 years. If true, this means that the modern human must have been around much earlier than anyone imagined.

Back at Jwalapuram, archaeologists are still amazed how a volcano in Indonesia impacted a settlement in the heart of the Indian Peninsula - and how it got frozen in time, only to clear the mist, from our past!