Fresh evidence shows two prominent south-west Victorian volcanoes, Budj Bim and Tower Hill, erupted at least 34,000 years ago and that people were in the area before those eruptions.

Key points:

• Scientists have been able to provide a more precise date for the eruptions of two Victorian volcanoes
• A human-made axe was found buried in volcanic ash at Tower Hill in the 1940s
• The presence of the stone axe shows people were around prior to the eruptions

Scientists involved in a study dating lava from the volcanoes said their calculations, paired with the 1947 discovery of an axe head buried under volcanic ash near Tower Hill, indicate people were around before it erupted.

The remnants of volcanoes at Budj Bim, formerly known as Mount Eccles, and Tower Hill, which overlooks the coastal town of Warrnambool, have previously been assumed to be at least 30,000 years old, but the new study has provided a more precise date.

The eruption at Budj Bim resulted in a lava flow used thousands of years later by Gunditjmara people to construct a system of eel traps now on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

'Most definitive record of Aboriginal inhabitation'

Head of the University of Melbourne's School of Earth Sciences, David Phillips, is in a team of four, including Curtin University researchers, attempting to verify dates of former volcanoes in the New Volcanics Province.

He said the radiometric dating technique used, which examined the presence of the gas argon within rocks formed from lava, was much more accurate than the carbon-dating methods previously used.