Abstract
The database regarding the earliest occupation of Europe has increased significantly in quantity and quality of data points over the last two decades, mainly through the addition of new sites as a result of long-term systematic excavations and large-scale prospections of Early and early Middle Pleistocene exposures. The site distribution pattern suggests an ephemeral presence of hominins in the south of Europe from around 1 million years ago onward, with occasional short northward expansions along the western coastal areas when temperate conditions permitted. From around 600,000–700,000 years ago, Acheulean artefacts appear in Europe and somewhat later hominin presence seems to pick up, with more sites and now some also present in colder climatic settings. It is again only later, around 350,000 years ago, that the first sites show up in more continental, central parts of Europe, east of the Rhine. A series of recent papers on the Early Pleistocene palaeontological site of Untermassfeld (Thuringia, Germany) makes claims that are of great interest for studies of earliest Europe and are at odds with the described pattern: the papers suggest that Untermassfeld has yielded stone tools and humanly modified faunal remains, evidence for a 1 million years old hominin presence in European continental mid-latitudes, and additional evidence that hominins were well-established in Europe already around that time period. Here, we evaluate these claims and demonstrate that these studies are severely flawed in terms of data on provenance of the materials studied and in the interpretation of faunal remains and lithics as testifying to a hominin presence at the site. In actual fact, any reference to the Untermassfeld site as an archaeological one is unwarranted. Furthermore, it is not the only European Early Pleistocene site where inferred evidence for hominin presence is problematic. The strength of the spatiotemporal patterns of hominin presence and absence depends on the quality of the data points we work with, and database maintenance, including critical evaluation of new sites, is crucial to advance our knowledge of the expansions and contractions of hominin ranges during the Pleistocene.
Highlights
Our database regarding the earliest occupation of Europe has increased significantly in quantity and quality of data points over the last two decades, mainly through the addition of new sites as a result of long-term systematic excavations (e.g. at Atapuerca, Spain (Bermúdez de Castro et al 2011; Carbonell et al 1995), with late Early Pleistocene finds, dating to more than 800 ka (1 ka = 1000 years before present) and large-scale prospections of Early and early Middle Pleistocene exposures
In order to evaluate the recent claims regarding a hominin presence at the site, we studied the material published in the articles at stake, as far as that was available: a small sample of faunal remains and 11 lithic objects
The absence of any hominin traces whatsoever at the Untermassfeld site and the problematic character of the claims made for sites such as Vallparadis and Le Vallonet imply that at the scale of Europe, solid undisputed evidence for a hominin presence in the Early Pleistocene is rare (Muttoni et al 2015), suggestive of an intermittent presence, with the earliest sites located at most 40° north—as is the case across much of Eurasia, from northern Spain (Atapuerca: Carbonell et al 2008), to Dmanisi in the Georgia (Ferring et al 2011) all the way to the Nihewan Basin in northern China (Dennell 2013)
Summary
The Earliest Occupation of EuropeAt the end of the Pleistocene, human populations had colonised almost all corners of the world, in a process of range expansion from Africa which had started minimally by 1.8 million years ago. A rich database exists on Pleistocene climatic and environmental variability in this part of the hominin range which allows interpretation of patterns of hominin colonisation against the background of fine-grained environmental changes (Ashton and Lewis 2012; Dennell 2003; Dennell et al 2010; Kahlke et al 2011; MacDonald et al 2012; Roebroeks 2006). Our database regarding the earliest occupation of Europe has increased significantly in quantity and quality of data points over the last two decades, mainly through the addition of new sites as a result of long-term systematic excavations (e.g. at Atapuerca, Spain (Bermúdez de Castro et al 2011; Carbonell et al 1995), with late Early Pleistocene finds, dating to more than 800 ka (1 ka = 1000 years before present) and large-scale prospections of Early and early Middle Pleistocene exposures. A good example of such prospection work is the case of the Cromer Forest Bed formation in East Anglia, UK (Parfitt et al 2005, 2010), which yielded evidence for surprisingly early (up to c. 800 ka)—and possibly short-term—range expansions into northwestern Europe, up to 53° north
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