Scientific research certifies – 2

An international and interdisciplinary team of scientists has presented a new study proving that the territory of modern Europe experienced an extreme cold snap about 1.1 million years ago. It probably led to the death of the first people who came to these lands. According to Live Science, scientists suggest that a sudden cold snap destroyed the archaic human species Homo erectus, the first representatives of which entered Europe more than a million years ago. At least, the data presented in the work on a sharp decrease in temperature coincide with the known data on the settlement of the continent by humans. Previous studies have shown that representatives of the human species Homo erectus arrived in Europe from Asia between 1.8 and 1.4 million years ago. This is indicated, for example, by the stone tools found. However, the "European" history of Homo erectus was abruptly interrupted about 1.1 million years ago. Archaeologists have not found any sites or artifacts of that period. The age of the next evidence of the presence of archaic people in Europe is approximately 900 thousand years. Moreover, it was already a different human species – Homo antecessor, a later and more enduring one that arrived on the continent from Africa. "There is an obvious gap of 200,000 years," says the study's lead author, Chronis Tsedakis, a paleoclimatologist at University College London. – This gap is comparable in time to the recently revealed period of sharp climate cooling. All this suggests that frost expelled or destroyed all archaic people from Europe." Scientists found evidence of a sharp drop in temperature by studying the cores of marine sediments. The images were taken from the ocean floor off the coast of Portugal. The analysis of isotopes of various chemical elements in the remains of marine plankton showed that the cold snap began about 1.15 million years ago. According to Tzedakis, the water temperature near Lisbon, which now averages 21 degrees Celsius, dropped to 6 degrees Celsius at that time. The researchers also found that about 1.13 million years ago, a steady influx of cold water began on the continent. Scientists believe that it was meltwater coming from glaciers. The authors of the work also write that our planet has gone through many alternating cold and warm phases. Until now, it was believed that the ice age reached its peak about 900 thousand years ago. However, a new study proves that this peak probably occurred a little earlier, namely about 1.1 million years ago.