Around 14,700 years ago, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere spiked to their highest levels in more than 10,000 years, as Europe entered a warm and moist interstadial period.
Bands of hunter-gatherers occupied the continent, people who were making tools, weapons and jewellery, people that understood the natural world, were artistic and skilled, and who had developed various rites and rituals.
But whilst the temperatures were warmer, the climate was from from stable, and human populations had to adapt to a constantly changing environment.
But whatever adaptations humans had to make for the climate, nothing would prepare them for what was to come. In Western Germany, something was bubbling beneath the earth’s crust, something big, and something that would have impacted the lives of so many hunter-gatherer communities, over a vast area of land from Britain to Italy and beyond.
This was the Laacher See volcanic eruption of 13,077 years ago, something akin to Mount Doom in the new Amazon Prime Ring's of Power series. It is located in Eifel, a low mountain range in western Germany and it goes down in history as one of Central Europe’s largest volcanic eruptions over the past 100,000 years.
In this video we take a look at this devastating natural disaster, as well as the hunter-gatherer population that lived in the region at the time of the eruption.