PARIS, Dec 14: Early Man colonised northern Europe around 700,000 years ago, some 200,000 years sooner than previously thought, British archaeologists believe. The finding will rewrite the odyssey of Homo erectus, the ancestor of modern man, who ventured out of Africa and spread northwards into Eurasia.

The established timeline has these humans colonizing the southern Caucasus about 1.8 million years ago, then venturing westwards along the Mediterranean, reaching Spain and Italy around 800,000 years ago.

But, until now, it was thought that bitter cold from a lingering Ice Age thwarted these Stone Age pioneers from moving northwards for hundreds of thousands of years.

The earliest evidence of human settlement north of the Alps and the Pyrenees dates from about half a million years ago, thanks to findings at Mauer, Germany, and Boxgrove, England.

That assumption has now been overturned by remarkable finds excavated from eroding coastal cliffs in Suffolk, a county in eastern England.

In a paper published in the British science journal Nature, Anthony Stuart and Simon Parfitt of University College report the finding of 32 flint artefacts, retrieved from a layer at Pakefield, Suffolk.

The artefacts are sharp-edged flakes, some more than 20mms long, that were chipped away from larger pieces of black flint as the humans made tools, they believe.

Working in arduous conditions at low tide, the researchers also found an array of plant and insect fossils, including species that could not have survived deep cold.

The fossils suggest that the landscape at the time comprised a meandering river, marshland and grassland that would have provided plenty of food for bisons, lions, wolves and mammoths, among others.

“The floodplain would have provided a resource-rich environment for early humans, with a range of plant and animal resources,” the paper says.—AFP