A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

A photograph of a volcanic eruption in Iceland, where a short volcano spews lava into the air with smoke.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

If you were lucky 74,000 years ago, you would have survived the Toba supereruption, one of the largest catastrophic events that Earth has seen in the past 2.5 million years.