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Archaeology

Out in the cold

Nature volume 413, pages 33–34 (2001)Cite this article

Humans are very adaptable: during the last ice age, they apparently lived within the Arctic Circle. The discovery suggests that, although cold, the region was probably not covered in ice at the time.

Archaeological finds described by Pavlov and colleagues on page 64 of this issue1 show for the first time that humans were present north of the Arctic Circle almost 40,000 years ago, in the last ice age. The idea of people living in a land gripped by an ice age goes back to nineteenth-century France, but the new finds extend both the geographic and the temporal range of the phenomenon. The results should also rekindle debate about the effects of the climate on the movements of early human populations.

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Figure 1: Climate and early human populations.

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  1. Department of Archaeology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

    John A. J. Gowlett

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  1. John A. J. Gowlett
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Gowlett, J. Out in the cold. Nature 413, 33–34 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35092660

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