The Ancients - The First Europeans

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Europe’s earliest known humans lived over 1.2 million years ago. After initially roaming the plains of Iberia in small groups, they spread across the Pyrenees into the wider European continent. But for more than 100,000 years all traces of humans in these regions vanish. The question is…what happened?In today’s episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Chris Stringer, and by Dr. Chronis Tzedakis and Dr Vasiliki Margari to explore the fate of these first Europeans and discover how a massive climate disaster drove some of Europe’s earliest humans to extinction. This episode was produced by Joseph Knight and edited by Aidan Lonergan.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's 1.2 million years ago in the Iberian Peninsula, modern-day Spain and Portugal. Small groups of early humans are roaming around the landscape, slowly populating the European continent. They are some of the first known humans in Europe, the first Europeans. But around 1.1 million years ago, the record goes dark. All traces of humans in this area of the world

vanishes for more than 100,000 years. Recently, a catastrophic answer for this lack of evidence has emerged. A massive event of climate change. A continent-wide disaster, especially in Western Europe. Temperatures cooled to such an extent that early humans there were driven to extinction. It's amazing new research, right at the heart of this evolving story about the first Europeans. Top and tailing this episode, we have an interview with ancient's favourite and human evolution heavyweight, Dr Chris Stringer CBE from the Natural History Museum. Chris is here to highlight the current evidence we have for early humans in Europe a million years ago, where on the continent this evidence has been found, and what species of human these remains may well have belonged to.

Sandwiched between our chats with Chris, we have the story of this brand new climate change catastrophe discovery with leaders of the project, Dr Kronis Sedakis and Dr Vasiliki Margari, who will talk us through the process of uncovering this massive climatic calamity and what exactly appears to have happened. I really do hope you enjoy. And to kick off the episode, here's Chris. Chris, always a pleasure. Great to have you back on the podcast. It's a pleasure to be with you once again. And it always seems like there's this new research, really interesting discoveries coming out of this field. It's a brilliant time to be involved in the field of human evolution.

And in this case, the story of humans in Europe more than a million years ago. And we're figuring out more about when they lived and when they disappeared. Yes, that's right. So this is really new work. And it gives us a picture of really a poorly understood time in early European human history. And set the scene, so between two and one million years ago, this is important time for humans reaching Europe for the very first time. Yes, that's right. So we think that Homo erectus, this ancestral species, evolved in Africa and soon after two million years,

it started to come out of Africa and spread. And we find the remains of Homo erectus, a very primitive form, at a site called Dmanisi in Georgia, in the Caucasus. So right on the edge of Europe, on the eastern end of Europe, and erectus spreads over to the Far East. We find remains in China and Indonesia. But for Europe, there's been a long debate about when humans first got to Europe. And the first really sound evidence, at least for me and some of my colleagues, is about 1.4 million years. And you've got some rather fragmentary fossils from Spain, from two parts of Spain, northern and southern Spain. And they're not complete enough to say what species they are, but they

could well be Homo erectus. So they might tell us that erectus was in Western Europe, Southwestern Europe by 1.4 million. Now, of course, it could well be earlier than that, but at least by 1.4 million, humans were in Western Europe and probably in Southern Europe in places like Italy as well. And do we also have sites of stone tools dating to this time too? So we don't just have these very early fossils, but we also have the tools that they were using too. Yes, so there's certainly a number of archaeological sites in Europe that could be of this age. And so, for example, in Italy, there's a site called Pira Nor, dating from about 1.5 billion, and that's just stone tool evidence at the moment. There are no fossils there. But yes,

I think we can map that at least people were in Southern Europe 1.4 million years ago. And from where do we think these humans came from? We'll get onto the particular species in a bit, but do we think they're coming from directly east from places like the Black Sea and the Caspian or are they working their way around the Near East from Northeast Africa? So it's very difficult to tell where these people were coming from. Obviously, I mentioned the Dmanisi site in the Caucasus. We've also got evidence of humans in places like Israel, one and a half million years ago, from stone tool evidence. So I think we just don't have enough information to map. But our guess is it would be coming through Southern Europe,

possibly through Turkey and into Greece and entering Europe that way. But to be honest, we really don't know. And you mentioned these sites in Spain, in northern and southern Spain. But when talking about the fossil evidence we have for these very earliest humans that we know of, what types of evidence are we talking about? Are we talking about very small bones or do we have more? So the evidence from 1.4 million years ago in Europe is really sparse. We're talking about a few bits of teeth and bones. They're tiny bits, nowhere near enough to even tell what species of human it is. Human teeth

certainly, but what species it is, we can only guess that it's probably Homo erectus, but we can't even be sure. So Homo erectusus that is our best guess at the moment as to who these first people who came to Europe were? Yes our best guess is it's homo erectus and that's because it's the only species that's even near Europe at that time that we know about. And Chris for roughly how long do we think erectus was living in that area of Europe? So in terms of mapping human presence we've got these remains at 1.4 million, maybe 1.5 million, including the archaeology from Italy. And then there's more material from Spain, from Atapuerca. There's a site called Simo del Elefante, which has a jawbone at about 1.2 million years.

And it's relatively complete. It's a bit homo erectus-like, but again, you can't really be sure that it's erectus. So certainly humans around for several hundred thousand years, at least until about 1.2 million years. So we have this evidence for early humans in Europe going down to roughly 1.1 million years ago. But then something truly catastrophic appears to have happened. A natural disaster, extreme climate change, that looks to have wiped out these first Europeans. A local extinction. It's incredible new research, spearheaded by husband and wife,

Dr Kronis Zedakis and Dr Vasiliki Margari. I headed up to Cambridge to interview them all about it. diary. I headed up to Cambridge to interview them all about it. Kronis, Vaz, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today. Thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thank you, Tristan. You're very welcome. And thank you for inviting me up to your house to do this in person. In-person interviews, always so much better. Now, I must ask, first off,

this is really interesting, groundbreaking new research. You and your colleagues, you found evidence of not just a small cooling event, but a massive cooling event that wiped out early humans in Europe more than a million years ago. It is astonishing research. Yes. So it was a surprise. So what we really found was that there was a period around 1.1 million years ago that was an extended glacial period and actually it culminated with 4,000 years of temperatures dropping to 5.5 degrees in the surface of the ocean just off Lisbon. So if we put this in perspective, I mean, that's a huge drop. And we do believe that it would have affected the presence of humans in Iberia. Today, the temperature, the sea surface temperature, the mean annual is about 1920 degrees.

So just to give a sense of how much colder this is. It is an absolutely massive drop but before we get to that let's talk about the background to your research. So in that period more than a million years ago when we have these tantalising clues of early humans in places like Spain in Iberia, you both focus on geography and climate. Do you have any idea what the paleoenvironment, what the climate was like for these first early humans in Europe? Yes, the evidence that we have, and this comes from records from the land but also from the sea, is that there is climate cyclicity. About every 40,000 years is a cycle that has a cold bed and a warm bed and the warm

beds are slightly warmer than today and a lot wetter than today so the summers are not that dry in southern Europe and the cold beds the glacial periods are relatively short about 10,000 years long not very extreme. The temperature not much colder than today, slightly drier. So the overall context of when these humans first come into Southern Europe is that of relatively mild conditions. Relatively mild conditions. And I know we're going to be using the word glaciers quite a bit and interglacials, but just so we are 100% clear on it, what do we mean with these climate cycles when you have more than a million years ago, glacial periods and interglacial periods? Okay, so what we call the Coternary, which is the last

2.6 million years, we have the Coternary Ice Ages, which is a series of cycles, about 50 of those, that you have the warmer bits called the interglacial and the cooler bit, which is the glacial. And in fact, the reason why we have these names is that glacials were discovered first. You know, there was first evidence of a glaciation. This is 19th century. Then they found multiple glacials. this is 19th century, then they found multiple glacials, and in between, sandwiched, they found deposits that had the context, you know, with the leaves and the pollen was much warmer. So, the name interglacial comes from having, it's in between the glacials, okay, so the interglacials are the warmer pits. And in the first part of this 2.6 million year period, from about 2.6 to about

900,000 years ago, the cycles happen about every 40,000 years and they are not very extreme. And then about 900,000 years ago there's a big glaciation and then the cycles become more longer about every 100,000 years, and they are much stronger. They're amplified. So the glacial periods are much more extreme. And so that's the context. That's the general theory that we have known is that, yeah, in the early part, things were not particularly extreme, but then they get more extreme as time goes on.

And was that the state of research before your study, that the first really extreme glacial event occurred some 900,000 years ago in Europe? Yes, the received wisdom so far was that from the existing paleoenvironmental data that we had, it appeared that the first really cold glacial was around 900,000 years ago. Until we get to what you and the team have been doing over the last more than a year? Oh, many years. I think we started in 2015, did we? Yes. Yes, yeah. A massive project indeed. Well, let's delve into this project. When it began, because I know it evolved quite a lot, but what were the aims of your project, of your research when it started? The idea was to provide the paleoclimate context for the earliest human occupation and for that very generously funded by the Leverhulme

Trust. And the Leverhulme Trust are very good at funding projects that are in between different fields and straddle different fields, so this is the paleoclimate but also the paleoanthropology. And the reason we wanted to do it was we wanted to produce a continuous record of climate change because a lot of the sites that exist where the human remains are from Spain are from caves, but it's a discontinuous sedimentation. So we don't have continuous records. The recording turns on and off, and we don't know how long those gaps are. And so, as I said, we'll go offshore from Iberia, offshore from Portugal, where we have long continuous records and we can study these, both the changes

on land and in the ocean and put this together. That was the original idea, but we certainly never expected that we found what we found. To do this research, Cronus, Vaz and their colleagues had to study something called a deep-sea core, a long cylinder of sediments drilled up from 2.5km beneath the sea floor, just off the coast of Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean. The core was retrieved by an international consortium called the International Ocean Drilling Project back in 2011. They use big ships and what they do is the vessel comes to the area you're going to core, it's positioned above and it's corrected so it stays at the same place via satellite

and small engines that keep it. at the same place via satellite and small engines that keep it and then you start drilling you go down normally what you would do in that area you go to the small sea mounts you don't actually go to the very bottom to the flat area you want to be relatively near the continent so you can have the continental record but you don't want to have a lot of stuff like small earthquakes can send various things and you know and mess up the record so by being at the top of a small sea mount you get a relatively undisturbed record and what they do is they go and they take they go down they take nine meters they come up and they go and find the same hole

under two and a half kilometers right they find the same hole goes down the next nine meters and the next nine meters comes out nine meters, nine meters. And then what you do is you have a series of parallel holes so that when you take one drive and the next drive you may be missing a bit, you may have a gap. So then you do the next hole that is slightly offset so that you cover that thing of where you have a gap. So then you take, you do the next hole that is slightly offset so that you cover that thing of where you have the gap. And so by putting together, in this case, there were four holes, you create a continuous record that goes back in time. And how do you figure out which layer, sediment layer, in this deep sea core dates to that period that you want, which is more than one million years ago. Because so much work has been done, there is something what is known as the marine

isotope stratigraphy, which my mentor friend Nick Shackleton, who was the person who started here in Cambridge, you know, many years ago, showed that there is a global record that if you do analysis of marine organisms called foraminifera, and you look at the composition, the chemical composition of the shells, they reflect what the chemical composition of the seawater is, because they take the calcium carbonate from the seawater to build their shells. So if you look at the shells and the composition, it will tell you something how through time, and you have a whole series of these through cores, you pick up those forums and you analyze them. And what you find is that the changes in the, it's called the isotopic composition of those. And you look at the isotopes of oxygen. Isotopes

have the same number of protons and electrons, but they differ in the number of neutrons. So the oxygen-16 has eight protons, eight electrons, and eight neutrons. And then the O-18 is slightly heavier, and it has 10 neutrons. God, you're bringing me back to GCSE chemistry, which I thought I'd seen the last of many years ago, but okay. I think the easiest way to explain this, of what this stratigraphy is, is that there are the lighter oxygen isotopes and the heavier. And the relative abundance of those depends on how much of seawater is locked in ice sheets.

Because ice sheets will preferentially have the lighter isotope because it's easier to evaporate from the oceans. It gets locked. That's right. So it gets locked in and so then during glacial periods this isotopic signature of the seawater and the animals that live in it becomes heavier. So you know when you have a glacial period and you know when you have an interglacial period and you have already over decades, what's been developed is a very good, you know where you are,

you know which cycles there are, and they've been dated through various techniques. But more or less, wherever you drill in the ocean, you're going to find the same signal. And so they know exactly where you are in time. I was never huge into sciences at school, but even I was absolutely blown away there because it is fascinating, these resources that you have, you know, below the sea as well, you know,

some two and a half kilometres down, but you can acquire this sediment, this core to learn about the climate of people living in that area of the world more than a million years ago, and to find out this new information. Let's go forwards in your research. So you've now got this deep sea core. What particular parts of the core did you analyse to learn about the climate? So we looked basically into the different components of the sediment. So we looked at the microorganisms and we analyzed their chemical composition and we also looked at the pollen grains and also the chemistry of the sediments themselves and this way we were able to reconstruct not only sea surface temperature but also ocean circulation

and how vigorous it was and how much detrital input we had or how much sediment we had coming into the location of the core and also what the plants were doing on land. And what did this all reveal about the climate 1.1, roughly 1.1 million years ago? Come on, the big reveal. So we looked into two time slices and one of them was more or less what we were expecting and that was around 1.4 million years ago and there was a mild interglacial which was wet and also the glacial period was quite mild and then we moved forward a little bit and we looked at another cycle of glacial interglacial conditions and during the interglacial we found I suppose what we were expecting more or less that there were two expansions of temperate trees in Iberia and

this was followed by a glacial period that lasted quite a long time was it 30 000 years and the big surprise came at the end of this glacial period. So what we found was that this was increasingly unstable. So it was not just cold but it was becoming more and more unstable and at the end there was a big drop that we have sea surface temperatures plummeting to 5.5 degrees and also the evidence from the land shows that there were very few trees remaining on land. So the changes like that that we saw in terms of the drop in temperature, the change in the landscape, that you go into a much more arid conditions,

the fact that this probably happened because you have a large expansion of ice sheets in northern Europe. And then the melting. So this is where that abrupt cooling comes from. It's the melting of the ice sheets that comes down and all this melt water stratifies the North Atlantic. So you have this fresh water film on top of the sitting of the ocean that then disturbs the ocean circulation, the Gulf Stream, what we think of the Gulf Stream. So it weakens that circulation. So there's no more that warmth coming into Europe via the North Atlantic surface current.

And that's what the cooling event is. So you look at this and you say, OK, so these humans, the evidence suggests they're perhaps not big body fat, I think the paleoanthropologists would say, from bones, general of that homo erectus early humans. Also, there's no evidence that they used fire as a tool. There's no charcoal in the remains, you know, there's no charcoal in all these sediments where you find stone tools in human remains until much later. And so you think that they probably didn't know what hit them when that came. But also they wouldn't have anything to eat in a way that the resources on land were greatly

reduced as well. So it was not just the cold, it was just they wouldn't have availability. That's right. The net primary productivity would have been decreased so therefore the It was just they wouldn't have availability of… That's right. The net primary productivity would have decreased, so therefore the animal populations would have decreased, so everything became a lot harder. But that's a lot of arm-waving, what we're doing at the moment. So then what we thought is that we needed to do this in a much more quantitative way. And for that we turned to our colleague Axel Timmerman

in South Korea and in Busan. And Axel is one of the world's foremost paleoclimatologists. And he had developed a method for each of those different archaic species of looking at what was the preferred environmental conditions that they would survive. So then what we asked him to do is that he did one for the other colleagues in our team, Chris Stringer and Simon Parfit and Nick Ashton, produced a database for Europe and for Southwest Asia and of the human remains of all the evidence that we have of occupation.

And so that was put into the model. And then what Axel also used is that this cooling, he simulated that cold event. And in fact, it was a pretty conservative simulation. Didn't get that much cooling in the ocean, get about 50% of that. And even with that, and he looked at what happened, the impact on archaic humans that would have had, and according to these models, that they could not have survived it. So that was a clincher, because there was the paleoclimate evidence, there was the paleo-thropological evidence for the team, and then there was the climate modeling and

habitat suitability modeling that, when it all came together, produced this story. And what a story it is. This new research by Kronis, Vaz and the team is extraordinary, suggesting that there was this local extinction of early humans, probably Homo erectus, in Europe roughly 1.1 million years ago, caused by this extreme climate change. If you want to learn even more about the intricacies of their very scientific research, well do check out their research paper in the journal Science.

Now of course, early humans did ultimately return to Iberia and Western Europe more generally. The big question is when and what species? More generally, the big question is when and what species. So Chris, we have this devastating climatic event, this massive cooling event, which seems to wipe out all humans in Europe, 1.1 roughly billion years ago. Do we know when people return to Europe? So the return of people to Europe after this catastrophic event is very difficult to determine because obviously we have to look for the earliest evidence after 1.1 million. And really, at the moment, well-dated evidence we can only place at around 850 or 900,000.

So in Britain, for example, we've got archaeology and even footprints dated at around 900,000 years at Haysborough in Norfolk. And at that time, an early version of the River Thames was flowing out to the North Sea at that time. People were living alongside that river, walking alongside it, leaving their prints in mud, leaving their stone tools behind. So that's about 900,000 years. We don't have human fossils, but there are human fossils from about 850,000 years back again at Atapuerca in northern Spain. And this is the material, quite a lot of material, over 150 fossils assigned to a new human species, well, new 20 years ago, Homo antisensor pioneer man. And this is a more derived, a more evolved species than Homo erectus.

And we've got every, you know, lots of bits of the skeleton represented. And it may well be that was the species that came up to Britain and made those footprints at Haysborough. But of course, without the fossils at Haysborough, we can't be sure. It's a great example, isn't it, with this new research that has now been published, that almost like the story of the first Britons. It's not a continuous story of humans first reaching that area like the story of the first Britons. It's not a continuous story of humans first reaching that area of the world and then evolving and evolving until where we are today. But again, it's a time of people arriving, then a wipeout, then more first Europeans arriving, and so on

and so on. It's not continuous. Yes, it certainly wasn't continuous. And of course, yes, we can map at least 10 colonisation events in Britain of new populations coming in and then disappearing again. And this happened over and over again, about every 100,000 years throughout our history, back as far as Haysborough, 900,000 years or so. And of course, Haysborough may not even be the oldest. It's the oldest we've got recorded so far. With this new research about when the first people are in Europe and this massive cooling event, it's very exciting for the future and what other new information will be revealed about the climate and how these people lived roughly a million years ago in this area of the world. Yes, that's right. I mean, we've got a lot to learn about this period of

time because obviously we've only just really established that there was this extreme cold event, which we didn't know about before this latest evidence. And of course, the interesting question is, how did people cope at that time? What's interesting is that at Hayesborough, for example, they are in a colder environment. The vegetation is more like the vegetation we find in southern Scandinavia today. So it looks like they were living in summers more or less as warm as we've got today, but the winters were distinctly colder. So people by 900,000 years ago looked like they were a bit more resilient. They are surviving in conditions that are distinctly colder than the present day. How were they doing that? Well, we don't know, but they may well have been doing it with physical changes. Maybe their physiology was adapting to the cold. Maybe they had more body fat. Perhaps they even

redeveloped body hair. And of course, they may have had clothing. They may have been constructing shelters, things like that. So that could have, perhaps they had the use of fire, but there is no evidence of that from these early sites. Brilliant. Well, Chris, it only goes me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed it again. Well, there you go. There was Professor Chris Stringer, Dr. Kronis Zedakis, and Dr. Vasily Margari talking through the ever-evolving story of these first Europeans, the first early humans who made Europe their home a million years ago and the climatic catastrophe that they fell victim to.

Evidence is still very limited so it's very exciting to see what new discoveries will be made in the years ahead and the new light they will shine on this still very enigmatic period in pre-history. That is why I love the story of human evolution. Thanks to new scientific developments and excavations more information is always coming to light. New hypotheses are being put forward. Watch this space. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. Last thing from me, wherever you're listening to the ancients, make sure that you are subscribed, that you click the follow button on Spotify, our Apple podcast, wherever, so that you don't miss out when we

release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.