linguistic:voice_change
History of volcano understanding

Volcanoes are not distributed evenly over the Earth's surface but active ones with significant impact were encountered early in human history, evidenced by footprints of hominina found in East African volcanic ash dated at 3.66 million years old. The association of volcanoes with fire and disaster is found in many oral traditions and had religious and thus social significance before the first written record of concepts related to volcanoes. Examples are: (1) the stories in the Athabascan subcultures about humans living inside mountains and a woman who uses fire to escape from a mountain, (2) Pele 's migration through the Hawarian island chain, ability to destroy forests and manifestations of the god's temper, and (3) the association in Javanese folklore of a king resident in Mount Merapi volcano and a queen resident at a beach 50 km (31 mi) away on what is now known to be an earthquake fault that interacts with that volcano.

Many ancient accounts ascribe volcanic eruptions to supernatural causes, such as the actions of gods or demigods. The earliest known such example is a neolithic goddess at Çatalhöyük. The Ancient Greek god Hephaistos and the concepts of the underworld are aligned to volcanoes in that Greek culture.

However, others proposed more natural (but still incorrect) causes of volcanic activity. In the fifth century BC, Anaxagoras proposed eruptions were caused by a great wind. By 65 CE, Seneca the Younger proposed combustion as the cause, an idea also adopted by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who witnessed eruptions of Mount Etna and Stromboli, then visited the crater of Vesuvius and published his view of an Earth in Mundus Subterraneus with a central fire connected to numerous others depicting volcanoes as a type of safety valve. Edward Jorden, in his work on mineral waters, challenged this view; in 1632 he proposed sulfur "fermentation" as a heat source within Earth, Astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) believed volcanoes were ducts for Earth's tears. In 1650, René Descartes proposed the core of Earth was incandescent and, by 1785, the works of Decartes and others were synthesised into geology by James Hutton in his writings about igneous intrusions of magma. Lazzaro Spallanzani had demonstrated by 1794 that steam explosions could cause explosive eruptions and many geologists held this as the universal cause of explosive eruptions up to the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera which allowed in one event differentiation of the concurrent phreatomagmatic and hydrothermal eruptions from dry explosive eruption, of, as it turned out, a basalt dyke. Alfred Lacroix built upon his other knowledge with his studies on the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée, and by 1928 Arthur Holmes work had brought together the concepts of radioactive generation of heat, Earth's mantle structure, partial decompression melting of magma, and magma convection. This eventually led to the acceptance of plate tectonics.