Find Reveals Early Humans Who Endured Harsh Cold

LONDON (July 7) -- 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.

"We are still stuck in this Victorian image (that) the further you go back in time, the more primitive it has to be," says paleoanthropologist Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University. "The evidence is constantly showing us wrong."

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.

Whoever they were, these early humans had an eye for real estate. They may have lived in the shadow of the forest, but their sharp stone tools, used for cutting meat or wood, were found along what was a river estuary bordered by grasslands. Fossils show that mammoths, deer and ancient horses wandered the meadows -- a walking meat supply.

They would've needed that meat, because the short growing season and cold, dark winters meant they couldn't depend on edible plants as much as did their cousins in the south. Perhaps they had fur garments and simple huts, says study co-author Nick Ashton of the British Museum, but no one knows for sure. They may not have even had fire.

They did have competition. Fossilized droppings found at the site suggest that an ancient hyena as big as a lion menaced the humans' camps, and there were probably saber-toothed cats as well.

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.

Early humans have been found already at a slightly warmer and more southern spot in the nation of Georgia, says Susan Anton of New York University. Still, she says the new research is interesting and will help researchers understand just what prehistoric humans were capable of. "The absence of evidence tends to make us dumb things down," she says.

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."
• Scientists announced earlier this year that they'd found jewelry and makeup worn by Neanderthals, showing they were capable of sophisticated thinking.
• Stone tools found in India show early humans could learn by watching others and select different kinds of rocks to make different tools, according to a 2009 finding.

As new fossils and tools are discovered, Stringer says, "we can re-evaluate these people and find they share more features with us than perhaps was believed."