According to a new study led by UCL researchers, paleoclimate evidence shows that around 1.1 million years ago, the southern European climate cooled significantly and likely caused an extinction of early humans on the continent.
Published in the journal Science, the team of researchers discovered the occurrence of previously unknown extreme glacial conditions around 1.1 million years ago. The glacial cooling pushed the European climate to levels beyond what archaic humans could tolerate, emptying the continent of human populations.
The oldest known human remains in Europe have previously been recovered from Iberia and suggest that early humans had arrived from southwest Αsia by about 1.4 million years ago. The climate around that time would have generally been warm and wet, punctuated by mild cold periods. Up to now, the prevailing theory has been that once humans arrived, they were able to survive through multiple climate cycles and adapt to increasingly harsh conditions after 900,000 years ago.
Paleoclimate scientists from UCL, University of Cambridge and CSIC Barcelona analysed the chemical composition of marine micro-organisms and examined the pollen content in a deep-sea sediment core recovered from off the coast of Portugal.
