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AN ANCIENT FREEZE WIPED OUT ALL EUROPEAN HUMANS. Early humans arrived in Europe from SW Asia about 1.4M years ago, where they prospered in a relatively warm and wet interglacial climate. Several human species may have been there, but the dominant one appears to have been Homo antecessor. That species used to be considered the ancestor to both Neanderthals and modern humans, but based on dental protein analyses, Welker et al. (2020) suggest they were a sister lineage to our ancestor. These ancient humans hunted large game (and other humans - but we'll save that story for later), and they left a variety of primitive stone tools.But Margari et al. (2023) report that deep sea cores document that the climate became colder, culminating in a drastic glaciation about 1.1M years ago, comparable to any of the most extreme events of the last 400K years. The event killed or drove out all human inhabitants and left Europe depopulated for about 200K years. It also seems to have caused cold weather and droughts in Asia and Africa that decimated populations there. About 900K years ago, populations began to recover, and humans returned to Europe and, in some form or fashion, they've been there ever since.