Earliest known European died in English Riviera - Torquay (alongside Neanderthal neighours ? ) Swarming out of Africa more than 40,000 years ago, the earliest humans to enter Europe had an entire continent at their feet but settled in Torquay. A new analysis of a jaw bone found near the seaside town in Devon shows that, together with two milk teeth found at a site in Italy, it constitutes the earliest fossil evidence of modern humans in Europe. Scientists previously believed that homo sapiens had first settled in southern Europe and taken thousands of years to reach as far north as the land we now call Britain. But the new dating of the bone found in Kent's Cavern, a popular tourist spot, shows that our ancestors arrived here between 41,000 and 44,000 years ago some 7,000 years earlier than previously thought. While Torquay is now a popular summer holiday destination, the pioneers who travelled through land populated by Neanderthals, woolly rhinos and mammoths to get there would have found a rather different proposition. Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, said: "We were in the last ice age, so we imagine that these modern humans were actually coming into northern Europe during brief, warm pulse -- But shortly after the time of the Kent's Cavern people we go into one of these cold blips and we don't know if these people hung on, they may actually have died out in Britain and in northern Europe. "The Italian populations would have been much better positioned in more favourable conditions they've got more chance of surviving in the south." The researchers made their discovery after reanalysing the jaw bone, which was originally found in 1927 and which previous analysis had suggested was about 35,000 years old. They used a technique known as ultrafiltration to purify collagen deposits in the fossil and remove the masking factor of modern contamination, meaning they could more accurately date the fossil. The presence of modern humans in northern Europe at such an early date could suggest that they migrated from Africa in several waves, rather than in one large movement. It also proves that homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived side by side for a considerable period of time, adding weight to the theory modern humans played a role in their less evolved cousins' extinction. It remains unclear exactly when humans first left Africa, but the latest evidence suggests their migration into Europe may not have been as far behind their arrival in the Middle East and Asia as previously thought. Prof Tom Higham, of Oxford University, who led the research published in the Nature journal, explained: "For many years people thought Europe was a bit of a backwater, that modern people didn't get here until later than they did to other parts of the world. "The suggestion was that this was perhaps a Neanderthal stronghold, that there were bigger populations of Neanderthals in this part of the world than there were in others and that incursions of modern humans may have been delayed coming into western Europe." Prof Stringer added: "We would have said modern humans arriving in Australia about 45,000 or even 50,000 years ago looked a lot earlier than their arrival in Europe. "But now it's much closer, we've got a much closer synchrony of the arrival of modern humans down in Australia at one end of the known world at that time for humans, and at the other end in Britain. They are not too far apart in time." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/8864941/Earliest-known-European-died-in-Torquay.html
Looks like it all happened before creationist think god decided to stop his idle existence and do six days - "hard labour " .
