ABSTRACT
Herds of elephants, sparse deciduous forests, roaring lions, and grazing hippopotami-the African “emigrants’” new home must at first sight have appeared quite familiar. Southern Europe’s climate, at the time of the first human settlement about two million years ago, differed only superficially from that of Africa. Fossil sites in southern Spain, Israel, and Georgia bear witness to the first human arrivals in Europe. The first traces in central and southern Europe appear only a million years later. The famous Homo heidelbergensis jawbone from Mauer (Figure 9a), a child’s skull from Atapuerca, Spain (Gran Dolina), and skull fragments from Ceprano in Italy declare the further spread of early humans in Europe. The gap in finds of nearly a million years in Europe’s settlement history can perhaps be explained by the worsening climate of that era. The Pleistocene ice age, which began 2.4 million years ago, at first offered the early African immigrants a warm climate. In the course of the ice age, though, Europe’s environment and habitat changed so greatly that a variant hominid type slowly developed from the original Africans-the Neanderthals. They were the first humans who knew how to defy the cold periods of the ice age. Neanderthals hunted mammoths, the ice-age elephants, ate their meat and also utilized their pelts, leather, tendons, and bones, as can be shown from fossil finds. There are no parallel finds for the early European Homo erectus, the Homo heidelbergensis, from Europe’s ice-age animal world.
