Hundreds of thousands of years before cities, civilizations or even modern humans existed, a chain of powerful volcanoes repeatedly transformed one of the most important landscapes in human history. The East African Rift Valley, often described as the birthplace of humanity, experienced a series of enormous eruptions during a period when some of our earliest ancestors were evolving. Now, scientists believe those volcanic events may have influenced far more than the landscape itself.
A study published in Nature Communications suggests that explosive eruptions across the East African Rift Valley between about 320,000 and 170,000 years ago created dramatic environmental changes that early humans had to navigate. Rather than viewing volcanoes as isolated natural disasters, researchers say these events may have played an important role in shaping the environments where early human populations lived, adapted and survived.
