Extreme weather wiped out Europe's first inhabitants, according to new research involving Spanish scientists. It happened 1.12 million years ago, according to this work published Thursday in the journal Science that challenges the idea of an early and permanent 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 of the last 900,000 years.

However, now an international team led by researchers from University College London (UCL), the Institute for Environmental Diagnosis and Water Studies (IDAEA-CSIC) and the IBS Center for Climate Physics in South Korea, has discovered evidence of the appearance of hitherto unknown extreme glacial conditions around 1.12 million years ago.

Glaciations

“To our surprise, we discovered that the cooling was comparable to the most extreme events of the recent ice ages,” said Professor Joan Grimalt, a CSIC researcher at IDAEA, in a press release..

They hypothesize that this would have subjected small bands of hunter-gatherers to considerable stress, particularly as scientists believe early humans may have lacked adaptations such as sufficient insulation from fat, as well as effective clothing, shelter, or knowledge. to make fire.

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,” says IBS professor Axel Timmermann.

Taken together, their 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, Europe may have been recolonized around 900,000 years ago by more resilient hominins, with evolutionary or behavioral changes that allowed survival in the increasing intensity of Middle Pleistocene glacial conditions,” says Chris Stringer, co-author of the study. and researcher at the Natural History Museum, London.