New research suggests that people didn't enter the subcontinent of South Asia until after the eruption of Mount Toba, about 75,000 years ago, which is much later than experts had previously though.
A study released in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at both genetic data and archaeological information to piece together when people actually migrated from Africa to Asia, Live Science reported.
The findings of the study suggest people actually didn't arrive to the region which is now India, until about 60,000 years ago. Previous findings had claimed that humans had been there for twice as long.
Martin Richards, study co-author and archaeogeneticist at the University of Huddersfield in the U.K. believes that humans were not in the region when the gigantic volcanic eruption occurred.
"The ash from the eruption, which was an absolutely huge eruption, blew across all of India and smothered the whole region in ash, Modern humans weren't there when that happened. They arrived afterwards," he said.
The eruption from the volcano produced so much lava that it could have created two Mount Everests, it also left he region in the dark for several years.
In 2007 archaeologists in Jwalapuram, India found man-made tools both above and below the layer of ancient ash. The researchers believed that this finding showed that humans were in the area before the mega eruption. They even suggested that the migration could have taken place as far back as 130,000 years ago.
In the most recent study, Richards and his team looked at 817 samples of mitochondrial DNA. This DNA is only passed down through maternal genetics, and exists in the cytoplasm of the egg.
The team compared mitochondrial DNA from people living in the region today to existing DNA from "East Asia, the Near East and sub-Saharan Africa."
Through this research the team concluded that the people did not come to the region until after the eruption, and that they most likely arrived on the Western coast and colonized around the edges of the subcontinent before moving towards the center.
Another team, led by archaeologist Paul Mellars of the University of Cambridge, studied the ancient tools found in the region and compared them with artifacts from Africa.
The team concluded that the tools found under the ash in India were much different than the examples from Africa during the same time period. As a result of these findings, archaic humans such as Neanderthals must have made the tools.
"This paper provides a persuasively argued case that the Out of Africa movement took place around 60,000 years ago - that is after the Toba eruption event," said Jim Wilson, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study. "The findings are important for understanding the history of all humanity, given that southern Asia is on the route from Africa to East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australasia and the Americas."
