Smithsonian by Margaret Osborne 8/16/2023
New research suggests the continent was devoid of hominins for about 200,000 years after a previously unknown cold snapA period of extreme cooling in western Europe may have driven away the continent’s earliest human species, leaving the region devoid of hominins for about 200,000 years, a new study suggests.
Previously, scientists assumed humans had continuously occupied Europe since they first arrived more than a million years ago. But the new analysis, published last week in Science, points to an era devoid of historical evidence of humans.
“There’s an apparent gap of 200,000 years,” Chronis Tzedakis, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe.
This period, researchers say, coincided with a freeze. Tzedakis and his colleagues reconstructed the past climate by analyzing a deep-sea sediment core taken off the coast of Portugal. In the layers of prehistoric sediment, organic molecules produced by marine plankton provided a window into sea conditions, and buried pollen grains preserved a record of land vegetation. By putting this data into computer simulations, the researchers found a previously unknown period of cooling about 1.15 million years ago.
During this cooling, average winter temperatures plummeted by 9 to 13 degrees Fahrenheit in the eastern Atlantic, per a statement from London’s Natural History Museum. Air temperatures in the usually mild Mediterranean dropped well below freezing, writes BBC News’ Pallab Ghosh.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/an-extreme-ice-age-may-have-wiped-out-europes-earliest-humans-180982747/
