Message #159789

[Bianca]

A river system in the bed of the English Channel
may have acted as a barrier to humans and fauna










"There are large numbers of cut marks on them and they are almost entirely smashed. And that smashing looks remarkably like the patterns of breakage you get on the animal bones in the cave - which we have assumed to be for bone marrow extraction," co-author Roger Jacobi told BBC News.

But Dr Jacobi said this was not the only possible interpretation: "Another might be that the people were dying away from the cave," he posited.

"Other people are then making the human bones small and compact enough to bring them back to the cave where they are deposited. They cut off the flesh and smashed the long bones to make them more portable."

The new dates correspond precisely to a period of very rapid climate warming which could have occurred over as little as three years: "[The occupation] really is right on the cusp of this warming which we can see in Greenland ice cores," Professor Stringer told BBC News.

"Europe starts to defrost and the animals move; the humans are right there with them."