2023-08-18 14:15:28
Extreme cooling 1.12 million years ago has been found to have ended the first human occupation of Europe.
The oldest known hominin remains in Europe come from the Iberian Peninsula and suggest that the first archaic humans arrived from southwest Asia 1.4 million years ago. The climate at this early Pleistocene epoch was characterized by warm, humid interglacial periods and mild glacial periods, so it has long been assumed that, once the first humans arrived, they were able to survive in southern Europe through multiple climatic cycles and adapt to increasingly cold conditions in the last 900,000 years.
However, a study carried out by an international team led by researchers from University College London (UCL) in the United Kingdom, the Institute for Environmental Diagnosis and Water Studies (IDAEA) of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Spain, and the IBS Center for Climate Physics in South Korea, reveals the onset of hitherto unknown extreme glacial conditions around 1.12 million years ago. “This challenges the idea of an early and permanent human occupation of Europe,” says UCL professor Chronis Tzedakis.
The team of paleoclimatologists reconstructed the conditions recorded by a marine sedimentary core, from which samples were taken, and located off the coast of Portugal. The analysis indicates the presence of abrupt climate changes that culminated in extreme cooling 1.12 million years ago.
European countries and surroundings. (Image: THAT. CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
“To our surprise, we discovered that the cooling was comparable to the most extreme events of the recent ice ages,” says Professor Joan Grimalt, a CSIC researcher at IDAEA. This would have subjected the small bands of hunter-gatherers to considerable stress, “particularly as early humans may have lacked adaptations such as sufficient insulation from fat, as well as effective clothing, shelter, or knowledge of fire-making,” according to the researcher Vasiliki Margari.
To assess the impact of climate on early human populations, researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics developed a habitat suitability model that relates climate data to fossil and archaeological evidence of human occupation in southwestern Eurasia collected by researchers from the Natural History Museum in London and the British Museum. “The results showed that the climate around the Mediterranean strayed far from the conditions preferred by early humans during the cold glacial maximum,” according to IBS professor Axel Timmermann.
Taken together, the data and model results suggest that the Iberian Peninsula, and southern Europe more generally, was depopulated at least once in the Early Pleistocene. The apparent absence of stone tools and human remains for the next 200,000 years raises the intriguing possibility of a long-term hiatus in European occupation. “If this is true,” says Professor Chris Stringer, from the Natural History Museum in London and co-author of the study, “Europe may have been recolonized around 900,000 years ago by more resilient hominins, with evolutionary or behavioral changes that allowed for survival.” before the intensification of the cold climate of the Middle Pleistocene”.
The study is titled “Extreme glacial implies discontinuity of early hominin occupation of Europe”. And it has been published in the academic journal Science. (Source: IDAEA / CSIC)
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