In 2021, a team of archaeologists led by the University College of London (UCL) Institute of Archaeology dug deep trenches into the gravelly soil of a site southeast of London. Their routine job was to check the land before workers built the Maritime Academy secondary school, but the work became more and more exciting as they excavated.
From the 3-meter-deep trenches, they collected some 800 different stone artifacts thought to be over 300,000 years old – so old that they couldn’t say for sure which early human species had used them. At that point in time, Neanderthals were spreading throughout present-day England, and other species may have joined them, the new paper says.
