Samwik. Home erectus survived in Southeast Asia until possibly as recently as 30,000 years ago. This is quite near the centre of the eruption and so I doubt the destruction of humanity, or life in general, was as severe as some scientists like to make out.

Re. the studies. They show that modern human genes include some that show a regional origin from over the last 1.7 million years. These variations would not show up regionally if humans genes all came out of Africa in one go at any time since then. But as the writers on the paper on the split between humans and chimpanzees (another post, I forget which) say it may take a long time before their evidence is accepted.