Scientists discover how the first people of Europe died out 1.1 million years ago

The first humans of the Homo erectus species, who inhabited the territory of what is now Europe, probably died due to extreme cold that occurred 1.1 million years ago. This is stated in a new study.

Live Science reports that researchers examining fossils and stone tools indicated that the Homo erectus species migrated from Asia to Europe about 1.5 million years ago, but became extinct within 400 years.

Chronis Tsedakis, senior author of the study and paleoclimatologist at University College London, said that the researchers found evidence of cooling in cores of marine sediments taken from the ocean floor off the coast of Portugal. Their analysis of elemental isotopes in marine plankton remains from both the ocean surface and the ocean floor, along with analysis of pollen grains from land-based vegetation, revealed a sharp cooling around 1.15 million years ago.

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The water temperature near Lisbon, which now averages about 21 degrees Celsius, has dropped to about 6 degrees. There was a prolonged influx of cold water from the melting waters of Europe's ice sheets around 1.13 million years ago.

Tzedakis says that the Earth has gone through numerous cold and warm phases, with the peak of the ice age occurring 900,000 years ago.

The main cause of the cooling was the gravitational influence of Jupiter. The Earth's orbit was roughly circular around the Sun at the time, which is a circumstance that is associated with other phases of cooling in our planet's climate. This period was also marked by a significant drop in carbon dioxide levels in the Earth's atmosphere. However, it is unknown whether this was the cause of the cooling.

The new study also includes a detailed reconstruction by study co-author Axel Timmermann, a climatologist at the Institute of Basic Science in South Korea, which shows that extreme cooling would have made Europe too cold for archaic humans. They could have died of both cold and starvation, as animals and plants might not have been able to survive the cold snap.

As a reminder, scientists have reconstructed the face of a woman who lived 45,000 years ago.

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