News: Early human beings ventured....

'Early human beings ventured farther north than thought' Lonodn: Ancient man ventured into northern Europe far earlier than previously thought, setting on England's east coast mor than 800,000 years ago, scientists said.        It had been assumed that humans - thought to have emerged from Africa around 1.75 million years ago - kept mostly to relatively warm tropical forests, steppes and Mediterranean areas as they spread across Eurasia.        But the discovery of a collection of flint tools some 135 miles northeast of London shows that quite early on man braved colder climes.        "What we found really undermines traditional views about how humans spread and reacted to climate change," said Simon Parfitt, a University College London researcher. "It just shows how little we know about the movement out of Africa.         About 75 flint tools have been found at the site near Happisburgh, a seaside hamlet in Norfolk, Parifitt and colleagues reported. The researchers dated the artifacts to somewhere between 866,000 to 814,000 years ago or 970,000 to 936,000 years before the earliest known date for British settlement, in nearby Pakdefield.         Exactly what kind of humans made these tools is unknown. "It is impossible to guess who those people were without fossil evidence," said Eric Delson, an anthropologist at Lehman College of the City University of New York, who was not invloved in the research.         Mammoths and sabertoothed cats roamed the area at that time, and the river Thames folowed into the sea there about 150 kilometers to the north of where its mouth is today.The climate was a little colder than now, at least during the winter.          The Natural History Museum's Chris Stringer, another of the paper's authors, said living in such an environment would have been challenging. Thick forests meant a poor supply of edible plants and dispersed prey. In the winter, there would be less daylight for hunting and foraging. Then, of course, there was the cold.