A cooling event 1.1 million years ago doomed early human in Europe

Scientists found evidence of a massive North Atlantic cooling event about 1.1 million years ago that lasted roughly 4,000 years and appears to have wiped out the entire population of archaic humans who had colonized Europe

Long before our species Homo sapiens trekked out of Africa, earlier human species also spread to other parts of the world. That dispersal, however, sometimes encountered grave hardships.

Scientists on Thursday described evidence of a massive North Atlantic cooling event about 1.1 million years ago that lasted roughly 4,000 years and appears to have wiped out the entire population of archaic humans who had colonized Europe.

Based on fossils from Spain, that species is believed to have been Homo erectus, generally considered the first member of the human evolutionary lineage to have expanded beyond Africa. The species was the first possessing body proportions like ours and made innovations in stone tools.

The frigid interval - comparable in intensity to the more recent ice ages - appears to have rendered Europe inhospitable for the bands of early human hunter-gatherers, as extreme glaciation deprived them of food resources. Their cold tolerance may have been lacking, without sufficient fat insulation, while fashioning effective clothing and shelter and finding the means to make fire would have been challenging, the researchers said.

"There was probably a complete interruption in the early human occupation of Europe, possibly for a considerable time, with an entirely new population eventually coming back," said anthropologist Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London, a co-author of the research published in the journal Science.

Also Read | Six recent discoveries that have changed how we think about human origins

How many perished in this regional extinction event remains unclear.