Scientists have depicted early humans as wimps who couldn’t hack it
in chilly northern climates, but a newly discovered cache of stone
tools is forcing archaeologists to revise their opinions. Scientists reported at a news conference here today that creatures
much like us managed to carve out a living at a spot on the coast of
England roughly 900,000 years ago, when the area would have resembled
today’s southern Scandinavia in climate and landscape. Never before
have early humans been shown to live so far north.
The finding, which will be published in Thursday’s edition of
Nature, is the latest to show that scientists have perpetually
underestimated the humans who lived thousands and millions of years
ago. Accumulating evidence shows, for example, that Neanderthals were
not the stupid brutes of public image but beings capable of symbolic
thought.
The people whose tools were found in coastal England probably moved
there during a warm period, but they proved their toughness when the
weather cooled off, says Chris Stringer, an author of the new study.
“The remarkable thing is they don’t just give up when it starts
getting cold,” says Stringer, of London’s Natural History Museum.
“They’re hanging on here, at least for a while.”
Also remarkable is that these people apparently lived on the edge of
a vast spruce-pine forest, which is a hard place to survive even for
today’s hunter-gatherers. “What is really interesting here is that
these guys were living in a coniferous forested environment, which
would have had few resources in winter,” says Robin Dennell of the
University of Sheffield. Other scientists harbor doubts about the new findings or its
significance. Richard Potts of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Natural History said in an e-mail from Kenya, where he’s doing research,
that though the paper is “intriguing,” he’s concerned about the methods
used to claim that the site dates back nearly a million years.
Other new discoveries showing that ancient humans weren’t as simple
as once believed:
* Early humans who lived 500,000 years ago could hunt big game, says
Stringer, “leading more complex lives than I would’ve thought.” more
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