Our distant relatives and ancestors managed to survive in the icy and frozen wastelands of northern Britain 712 to 424 kya according to a paper published on Sep. 1, 2025.
These people were not Homo sapiens they were Homo heidelbergensis which we believe are the stock from which Neanderthals, Denisovans, and we originated from.
Read the article: Key, A., Clark, J., Lauer, T. et al. Hominin glacial-stage occupation 712,000 to 424,000 years ago at Fordwich Pit, Old Park (Canterbury, UK). Nat Ecol Evol (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02829-x
The site reveals that these people were well adapted to living in cold places. They also found tools of different people. The early occupants of the site lived there between 773 and 607 ky and used acheulean tools (first developed by H. erectus). This period was cold. This is "evidence of the earliest known Acheulean bifaces in northern Europe". Ths site was inhabited again some two hundred thousand years later (420 ky) by another group of hominins that also used Acheulean tools.
The paper stresses the fact that this site "provides evidence for Lower Palaeolithic hominins [and] early human presence above 51° latitude during a glacial stage and handaxe production in northern Europe from MIS 17 to 16".
The paper states that these people "could, therefore, have had the cultural and technological attributes necessary to survive in these cooler climates and ecologies." The authors reckon that they occupied this area during a cold but not glacial period, when there were grasslands and grazing animals in the area. Yet they don't rule out habitation during a colder period either, the evidence hints at a "potentially summer-only occupation and even ice-proximal conditions." At that time, the glacial front was only 65 km north of the site. Walls of ice marked the limit of habitability. There is little evidence of trees in the area and the plants recovered from the site suggest it was similar to the Siberian steppe.
However, the oldest evidence for controlled fire in Europe is more recent, some 300 to 400 thousand years ago. We don't know if these people in Britain used fire. Did they burn dung in the absence of wood? or did they burn bones? In any case, it shows that people with less cranial capacity than modern humans or our more recent relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, could cope with cold, icy climates and survive. This means that they could have done the same in Northeastern Asia (Northern China, Manchuria, and Siberia) on their way into America at any time between 700 and 400 ky.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
No comments:
Post a Comment