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An international and interdisciplinary team of scientists has presented a new study proving that the territory of modern Europe experienced an extreme cold snap about 1.1 million years ago. It probably led to the death of the first people who came to these lands. According to Live Science, scientists suggest that a sudden cold snap destroyed the archaic human species Homo erectus, the first representatives of which entered Europe more than a million years ago. At least, the data presented in the work on a sharp decrease in temperature coincide with the known data on the settlement of the continent by humans. Previous studies have shown that representatives of the human species Homo erectus arrived in Europe from Asia between 1.8 and 1.4 million years ago. This is indicated, for example, by the stone tools found. However, the "European" history of Homo erectus was abruptly interrupted about 1.1 million years ago. Archaeologists have not found any sites or artifacts of that period. The age of the next evidence of the presence of archaic people in Europe is approximately 900 thousand years. Moreover, it was already a different human species – Homo antecessor, a later and more enduring one that arrived on the continent from Africa. "There is an obvious gap of 200,000 years," says the study's lead author, Chronis Tsedakis, a paleoclimatologist at University College London. – This gap is comparable in time to the recently revealed period of sharp climate cooling. All this suggests that frost expelled or destroyed all archaic people from Europe." Scientists found evidence of a sharp drop in temperature by studying the cores of marine sediments. The images were taken from the ocean floor off the coast of Portugal. The analysis of isotopes of various chemical elements in the remains of marine plankton showed that the cold snap began about 1.15 million years ago. According to Tzedakis, the water temperature near Lisbon, which now averages 21 degrees Celsius, dropped to 6 degrees Celsius at that time. The researchers also found that about 1.13 million years ago, a steady influx of cold water began on the continent. Scientists believe that it was meltwater coming from glaciers. The authors of the work also write that our planet has gone through many alternating cold and warm phases. Until now, it was believed that the ice age reached its peak about 900 thousand years ago. However, a new study proves that this peak probably occurred a little earlier, namely about 1.1 million years ago.

An international team of researchers has identified a geological feature that, according to scientists, best reflects the proposed new era called the "Anthropocene". This is reported by The Guardian. The researchers clarified that the Holocene, the current epoch of the Earth, began after the end of the Ice Age, about 11.7 thousand years ago. In their opinion, in the middle of the XX century, the influence of mankind on the planet increased significantly, there was a shift, defined as a Great acceleration. This shift should be perceived, they added, as the beginning of a new era, the Anthropocene (the time of human domination). In order to confirm their conclusions, the scientists studied a variety of "natural archives" of the environment, in particular, they explored the coral reefs of Australia and peat bogs in Poland. In the end, experts noticed, the Canadian Lake Crawford was chosen. The layers of sediments at its bottom, which are located in a protected area and remain untouched by the outside world, record accurate data on the time during which they were deposited. Sediment cores from the lake, for example, show the presence of plutonium-239. This element hit the bottom due to nuclear weapons tests that have been conducted since the early 1950s.