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E-book The Earliest Europeans : A Year in the Life: Survival Strategies in the Lower Palaeolithic
Humans, represented by members of genus Homo, have been living in Europe for around 1.5 million years. But who were they? How did they survive? In short, what kinds of ‘humans’ were these? These are the fundamental questions addressed, though the lens of the changing seasons, in the pages that follow. But why ask these questions and why should we be interested in the answers? Beyond simple curiosity I think there are two answers. The first is that the deep prehistory of Europe is a place of dramatic fluctuations and changes in climates, landscapes and environments. How Lower Palaeolithic humans adapted and responded to those many fluctuations has much to tell us about our place in the world and, sometimes, our fragility in the face of nature. As H. sapiens our own origins are fundamentally African and grounded in the younger period known as the Middle Stone Age. However recent genetic studies have identified evidence of interbreeding between H. sapiens and various archaic hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, as we dispersed across the Old World (Galway-Witham and Stringer 2018). The behaviour and adaptations of archaic Europeans in the Lower Palaeolithic period, the time of the Neanderthals’ own ancestors, are thus informative both about themselves and, indirectly, us. Secondly, early humans are found across Europe, from Britain to Spain and from France to Bulgaria. Much of their archaeology, and by inference their behaviour, looks very similar, and yet, as so often, there is some devil in the details. The earliest Europeans therefore remind us of the human capacity for both local differences and broad similarities. As you will see in the pages that follow, the first Europeans were truly European.
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