AAAS: “Human ancestors braved England’s ice-covered northlands 440,000 years ago.” Ancient humans, ‘possibly a long-ago ancestor called Homo antecessor, moved into Northern Europe roughly a million years ago, leaving rare but striking evidence of their presence, including a collection of 850,000- to 950,000-year-old footprintsdiscovered on a beach on the southeast coast of England in 2013.’ At that point conditions in southern England were relatively warm, but thereafter temperatures varied, ‘on several occasions plummeting so low that glaciers began to grow.’ The hominins there [not H. sapiens, as our species not around until some 300,000 yrs ago] mainly moved south, especially since there is no evidence they had discovered fire [though clearly true in southern Africa, well before that point]. “In the 1920s, archaeologists discovered more than 300 ancient hand axes…but accurately dating the tools wasn’t possible with the methods of the time;” subsequently the technique of infrared radiofluorescence was invented. “The results [at a later excavation] confirm that as early as 773,000 years ago, ancient humans were present at the site, where they made some of the earliest Acheulian tools—hand axes and other implements with a distinctive bifacial profile—yet to be found in Northern Europe.” After a long hiatus in the archeological record, about 440,000 years ago, the sediment dates suggest humans reappeared, but H. antecessor had vanished. “Europe [by then] was home to other humans including Homo heidelbergensis, often regarded as an ancestor of the Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.” At the time of return, ‘thick ice sheets would have been present just 65 kilometers to the north.’ How did they survive? ‘Microscopic plant fragments recovered from the site suggest it was a cold grassland with few trees, similar to the present-day Eurasian steppe just to the south of the Siberian boreal forests. Raises more questions. “What natural shelters were available in a cold open landscape? What fuel sources would there have been?” We + the other hominins before us must have been tough buggers through + through. Probably rugby players. Wonder what energy systems these folks used to stay warm.
