A 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 [recently] 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.
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.
“Such a large change in temperature would have hit these humans hard, and they didn’t quickly recover,” Chris Stringer, a Natural History Museum scientist and co-author of the paper, says in the statement. “It would have led to changes in the flora and fauna as well, which could have left these humans with limited food options. Smaller cold stages later on would have delayed any recovery further, meaning that western Europe was probably depopulated for a long period of time.”
