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Europe: Early Homo Fossil Records

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

Research during the last decades on the first human dispersal out of Africa, into Eurasia, has changed the ideas on the chronology of this event, providing also new data on the ecological scenery that allowed humans to colonize new territories with different environments and climates from those in subtropical Africa, sometimes subject to inhospitable marked seasonality.

The origin of the genus Homo is directly related to a radical change in dietary behavior from its mostly vegetarian ancestors, the australopithecines, to more systematic carnivorous activities. This change in diet runs in parallel to an increase in encephalization, which resulted in greater cognitive abilities, and a decrease in gut size (Aiello & Wheeler 1995), thus allowing the emergence of a more intelligent and ubiquitous hominin. Meat is a food resource available everywhere inhabited by large mammals living and dying, which means that the genus Homowas not constrained to only exploiting soft...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro

  2. Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social – IPHES, Àrea de Prehistòria, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain

    Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro & Ignasi Pastó

  3. Museo de Prehistoria y Paleontología, Orce, Granada, Spain

    María-Patrocinio Espigares & Sergio Ros-Montoya

  4. Departamento de Ecología y Geología, Universidad de Málaga, Málaga, Spain

    María-Patrocinio Espigares & Paul Palmqvist

Authors
  1. Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro
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  2. María-Patrocinio Espigares
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  3. Ignasi Pastó
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  4. Sergio Ros-Montoya
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  5. Paul Palmqvist
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Martínez-Navarro, B., Espigares, MP., Pastó, I., Ros-Montoya, S., Palmqvist, P. (2014). Europe: Early Homo Fossil Records. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_646

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_646

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