Archaeologists unearth 600,000-year-old evidence of Britain's early inhabitants

[Judi Lynn]

1. Earliest Hand Axes In Britain Were Not Crafted By Homo Sapiens

These flint butchering tools found in southern England are far older than our species.
author
TOM HALE
Senior Journalist

Jun 22, 2022 8:57 AM

Flint axes dating back to around 600,000 years ago provide hard evidence of thriving communities in southern Britain earlier than thought – but we’re not talking about our species, Homo Sapiens. Instead, these bone scraping tools were likely made by Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct ancestor of Neanderthals known for his heavy brow and crafty skills.

As reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science this week, the relics have recently been studied by a team of archaeologists at the University of Cambridge, the University of Kent, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The artifacts were initially discovered in the suburbs of Canterbury in the 1920s by local workers, but a modern technique known as infrared-radiofluorescence (IR-RF) dating has finally revealed their true age. This remarkable technique is able to tell when certain minerals at the site were last exposed to sunlight, thereby exposing when the objects were most likely buried.

This revealed that the tools date to around 560,000 and 620,000 years ago, over 300,000 years before our species, H. Sapien, had even evolved. This was also a time when Britain was still connected to mainland Europe.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/earliest-hand-axes-in-britain-were-not-crafted-by-homo-sapiens-64159