January/February 2014 Issue

INDONESIA: Medieval chronicles cite 1258 as a bad year, when a cold, rainy summer led to flooding and terrible harvests. Ice core data point to a volcanic eruption as the cause, but despite decades of looking, volcanologists have yet to finger a culprit. New radiocarbon dates and geological data now point to Samalas volcano on Lombok Island. Samalas, whose eruption might have buried Pamalas, capital of the Lombok kingdom, now stands beside Toba (around 70,000 years ago), Tambora (1815), and Krakatau (1883) as Indonesian volcanoes that disrupted climate worldwide. —Samir S. Patel

LEBANON: New dating of shell beads casts doubt on the traditional theory that humans first made their way out of Africa and into Europe by going through the Near East. The beads come from a site where human remains were excavated decades ago and then were subsequently lost. They date to around 42,000 years ago, roughly the same time that modern humans appear in Europe. The fact that there appears to be no lag between humans arriving in different places suggests there might have been more than one route out of Africa. —Samir S. Patel

NORWAY: It can be hard to mine stone for making tools when your mining implements are also made of stone. At the Melsvik chert quarry, early Mesolithic people likely used a more efficient technique for extracting stone from the dense deposit—small bonfires to create temperature differentials high enough to crack the rock. Archaeologists conducted experiments that confirm that the method works—the cracking rock sounded like popping corn—and makes extraction features similar to ones observed elsewhere at the site. —Samir S. Patel