Europe was no balmy paradise during the Ice Age, with the vast glaciers that blanketed large parts of the continent rendering wide swathes inhospitable for humans. But our species - a new immigrant to Europe - endured, though with great hardship.
Various groups of hunter-gatherers roamed the European landscape, hunted large mammals including woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos and reindeer, and collected edible plants. During the Ice Age's coldest period, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, ice sheets called continental glaciers covered half of Europe, with much of the rest in tundra conditions with frozen subsoil.
"It is a big surprise that humans went extinct on the Italian peninsula," said study senior author Johannes Krause, director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. "From around 14,000 to 13,000 years ago, the climate became warmer and most parts of Europe gradually turned into forest, similar to today," Yu said.
Certain traits of Western European hunter-gatherers, known for blue eyes and dark skin, differed from their counterparts in Eastern Europe, who had light skin and dark eyes. Those two populations started to interbreed around 8,000 years ago only after the first farmers arrived in Europe from Anatolia - modern Turkey - and pushed all the hunter-gatherers northward.
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