An extreme cooling 1.12 million years ago ended the first human occupation of Europe, argues a study, through a sample collected on the Portuguese coast, and that “challenges the idea of an early and permanent occupation.”
The oldest known hominin records in Europe are from the Iberian Peninsula and suggest that the first humans arrived from southwestern Asia 1.4 million years ago.
The climate at the time, at the beginning of the Pleistocene, was characterized by warm and humid interglacial periods and mild glacial periods, according to the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and University College London (UCL) in separate statements.
It was long assumed that once humans arrived, they were able to survive in southern Europe through multiple climate cycles, adapting to the increasingly cold conditions of the past 900,000 years.
However, this work by a team of researchers from UCL, the Institute for Environmental Diagnosis and Water Studies (IDAEA-CSIC) and the IBS Center for Climate Physics in South Korea confirmed the appearance of extreme glacial conditions, unknown until now. , about 1.12 million years ago.
“This challenges the idea of an early and permanent human occupation of Europe,” said Chronis Tzedakis, a UCL professor, quoted by the EFE news agency.
Paleoclimatologists from UCL, the University of Cambridge and IDAEA-CSIC reconstructed the conditions of a marine sedimentary core collected off the coast of Portugal, which revealed the presence of abrupt climate changes culminating in extreme glacial cooling 1.12 million years ago. of years.
“To our surprise, we found that the cooling was comparable to the most extreme events of the last ice ages,” said Professor Joan Grimalt, a CSIC researcher at IDAEA.
This climate would have subjected small groups of hunter-gatherers to considerable stress, “particularly as early humans may have lacked skills” such as sufficient insulation, clothing, shelter, or effective knowledge of how to make a fire, researcher Vasiliki Margari said. from UCL.
To assess the impact of climate on early human populations, researchers at the IBS Center for Climate Physics developed a habitat suitability model that links climate data with fossil and archaeological evidence of human occupation in southwestern Eurasia, collected by Researchers at the Natural History Museum. of London and the British Museum.
“The results showed that the climate around the Mediterranean has moved away from the conditions preferred by early humans during the freezing cold,” said IBS Professor Axel Timmermann.
Taken together, the data and model results suggest that the Iberian Peninsula and southern Europe in general were 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 pause in European human occupation.
If true, “Europe may have been recolonized around 900,000 years ago by more resilient hominins, with evolutionary or behavioral changes allowing them to survive increasingly intense glacial conditions,” said Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum.
Source: TSF
