In Europe, there were pre-Neanderthals, the Northern Hemisphere of the Earth had less ice than today, and sea levels were approximately 10 meters higher. We are in the Lower Paleolithic, 400,000 years ago, a period called MIS 11c, the warmest on our planet in the last few million years.
According to a newly published study in Nature Communications, which included Professor Elisabetta Starnini from the University of Pisa, the cause of this exceptional climate phase of our planet was due to the warming of the seas (in turn due to a complex interplay of factors).
The research was based on a two-meter-long core extracted from the Grotta della Bàsura in Liguria (Italy) and analyzed using high-precision uranium-thorium dating techniques.
The discovery has allowed the reconstruction of the environmental history of Southern Europe from 480,000 to 360,000 years ago and has solved a paleoclimate enigma known as the “MIS 11c paradox”, which has long occupied researchers.
The Earth’s heat 400,000 years ago would not actually be justified by the levels of solar radiation and greenhouse gases.
“Today, as then, solar radiation was not particularly strong, but our study demonstrates how the prolonged warming of the oceans alone can cause a collapse of the ice sheet and a rise in sea levels without requiring extremely high atmospheric temperatures or concentrations of greenhouse gases”, explains Starnini.
“Therefore, the past climate is of utmost importance for understanding the future of our planet and the role that extreme climate changes may have played in human evolution”, concludes Starnini. “Just think that after the end of MIS 11, Europe began to be populated by a new species: the Neanderthal man”.
Elisabetta Starnini is a professor of Prehistory and Protohistory in the Department of Civilizations and Forms of Knowledge at the University of Pisa and has been working in the Grotta della Bàsura for years.
The research she collaborated on is the result of an international and interdisciplinary project led by the Department of Geosciences at the National Taiwan University, involving researchers from 20 research entities in Europe, the United States, and Asia.
SOURCES
Hu, HM., Marino, G., Pérez-Mejías, C. et al. Sustained North Atlantic warming drove anomalously intense MIS 11c interglacial. Nat Commun 15, 5933 (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50207-1
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