Mark
16-12-05, 11:42
Humans colonised Europe 700,000 years ago
Web posted at: 12/15/2005 3:22:8
Source ::: AFP
PARIS: Early Man colonised northern Europe around 700,000 years ago, some 200,000 years sooner than previously thought, British archaeologists believe.
The finding will rewrite the odyssey of Homo erectus, the ancestor of modern man, who ventured out of Africa and spread northwards into Eurasia.
The established timeline has these humans colonising the southern Caucasus about 1.8 million years ago, then venturing westwards along the Mediterranean, reaching Spain and Italy around 800,000 years ago.
But, until now, it was thought that bitter cold from a lingering Ice Age thwarted these Stone Age pioneers from moving northwards for hundreds of thousands of years.
The earliest evidence of human settlement north of the Alps and the Pyrenees dates from about half a million years ago, thanks to findings at Mauer in Germany and Boxgrove in southern England.
That assumption has now been overturned by remarkable finds excavated from eroding coastal cliffs in Suffolk, a county in eastern England.
Around 700,000 years ago, Britain was connected to continental Europe by a "land bridge" that extended the length of the English Channel today.
Suffolk and the neighbouring county of Norfolk were low-lying areas through which sluggish rivers meandered, depositing a thick layer of mud and sand.
The North Sea basin eventually subsided and the shallow coast of East Anglia emerged, exposing this sedimentary layer, called the Cromer Forest-bed Formation.
Victorian geologists were the first to spot it, identifying a trove of fossils of extinct mammals, molluscs, beetles, fruits and seeds.
Nearly a century and a half later, a team led by Anthony Stuart and Simon Parfitt of University College have taken these discoveries a giant's step further.
In a paper published in the British science journal Nature, they report the find of 32 flint artefacts, retrieved from a layer at Pakefield, Suffolk.
The artects are sharp-edged flakes, some more than 20mm long, that were chipped away from larger pieces of black flint as the humans made tools, they believe.
The researchers also found an array of plant and insect fossils, including species that could not have survived deep cold.
Web posted at: 12/15/2005 3:22:8
Source ::: AFP
PARIS: Early Man colonised northern Europe around 700,000 years ago, some 200,000 years sooner than previously thought, British archaeologists believe.
The finding will rewrite the odyssey of Homo erectus, the ancestor of modern man, who ventured out of Africa and spread northwards into Eurasia.
The established timeline has these humans colonising the southern Caucasus about 1.8 million years ago, then venturing westwards along the Mediterranean, reaching Spain and Italy around 800,000 years ago.
But, until now, it was thought that bitter cold from a lingering Ice Age thwarted these Stone Age pioneers from moving northwards for hundreds of thousands of years.
The earliest evidence of human settlement north of the Alps and the Pyrenees dates from about half a million years ago, thanks to findings at Mauer in Germany and Boxgrove in southern England.
That assumption has now been overturned by remarkable finds excavated from eroding coastal cliffs in Suffolk, a county in eastern England.
Around 700,000 years ago, Britain was connected to continental Europe by a "land bridge" that extended the length of the English Channel today.
Suffolk and the neighbouring county of Norfolk were low-lying areas through which sluggish rivers meandered, depositing a thick layer of mud and sand.
The North Sea basin eventually subsided and the shallow coast of East Anglia emerged, exposing this sedimentary layer, called the Cromer Forest-bed Formation.
Victorian geologists were the first to spot it, identifying a trove of fossils of extinct mammals, molluscs, beetles, fruits and seeds.
Nearly a century and a half later, a team led by Anthony Stuart and Simon Parfitt of University College have taken these discoveries a giant's step further.
In a paper published in the British science journal Nature, they report the find of 32 flint artefacts, retrieved from a layer at Pakefield, Suffolk.
The artects are sharp-edged flakes, some more than 20mm long, that were chipped away from larger pieces of black flint as the humans made tools, they believe.
The researchers also found an array of plant and insect fossils, including species that could not have survived deep cold.