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The first Europeans could have been considerably more numerous than previously believed. An international team led by Spanish researchers suggests that the human population of Western Europe between 350,000 and 500,000 years ago could have reached 25,000 individuals. Although to our eyes it may not seem like much – all together they would barely give to form a medium-sized locality today – the number far exceeds the few thousand individuals proposed in previous research. Furthermore, those early inhabitants were more widely distributed and continued to occupy the north during harsh glacial conditions.
That time period of the Pleistocene was crucial for human evolution in Europe, since then began the process that would give rise to Neanderthals, another human species with evidence of having been intelligent and sophisticated, and laid the foundations for the development of the Levallois , a new technology for the manufacture of stone tools.
It was also a time of marked climatic oscillations that could affect human populations and condition their evolution. A Homo sapiensthe species to which all modern humans belong, still had a long way to go to get here.
Jesús Rodríguez, from the National Center for Research on Human Evolution (CENIEH), explains that, in order to be viable, populations must have a minimum size, be large enough “so that there is a genetic flow that avoids the negative effects that consanguinity, one of the biggest problems in small populations». Very low genetic diversity “can cause any disease or random circumstance to lead to extinction,” he says. “Only a few thousand individuals in Europe and a thousand in the Iberian Peninsula – as previous studies pointed out – are extremely low, unrealistic figures,” he stresses.
The size of the groups could be similar to that of the hunter-gatherer bands of the 19th and 20th centuries in Africa or America, with about 20 or 25 individuals. “But surely they had relationships with other larger groups and occasionally met for different activities, exchanging individuals, etc…”, Rodríguez points out.
adapted to cold
To carry out this study, the team used a model that is commonly used to forecast where we might find a species in an area. In this way, he combined known human distribution data and changes in precipitation and temperature over millennia in Western Europe into a series of maps.
Contrary to what is usually thought, the results, published in ‘Scientific Reports’, not only show that the population density was much higher, but also that it did not vary drastically in cold periods compared to those of temperate climate. “We were surprised to find that a large part of the areas that were believed to be uninhabited during the glacial periods, north of the Pyrenees and the Alps, were actually still occupied,” says Rodríguez. The model predicts a continuous habitable area connecting the Iberian Peninsula with the British Isles through what is now France and western Germany. Thus, there were extensive habitable areas for humans during the European Middle Pleistocene.
“We suggested that even in the cold stages, northern Europe – perhaps not Great Britain but large parts of France – could be occupied,” says the researcher. In the previous model, the smaller populations remained separate – there was no connection between Spain and Italy – for tens of thousands of years, which would have had effects on human evolution. The results indicate that the two populations were connected during the coldest periods, “so they would be more extensive and problems of genetic drift would be avoided.”
In those cold stages, the average annual temperatures in northern Europe were close to zero degrees. To withstand them, individuals had to adapt: seek shelter, cover themselves with animal skins… In this way, “they could withstand such low temperatures even without using fire, which was not yet in general use.”
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