In other words, modern humans have never seen carbon dioxide in these proportions before.
That means the creature was contemporary with both Neanderthals and modern humans in the area.
The last time CO2 was regularly above 400ppm was three to five million years ago - before modern humans existed.
Bolstered by recent genetic evidence, it says that modern humans emerged in Africa alone, about 200, 000 years ago.
WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans
It was long known that modern humans overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe, apparently for more than 10, 000 years.
But many questions remain about the genetic relationships between these early modern humans and present-day Homo sapiens populations.
Arched feet, the discovery team tells the journal Science, are critical for walking the way modern humans do.
Anthropologists already knew of an early foray out of Africa by modern humans.
Neanderthal teeth reveal that they developed faster as juveniles than did modern humans.
Most strikingly, genome analysis showed that anatomically modern humans mixed with the Neanderthals.
No-one can say for sure what, if any, active role modern humans had in the decline of Europe's Neanderthals.
Signs of division of labour come only with the arrival of modern humans into Europe around 40, 000 years ago.
But future research is also likely to focus on the 70-plus amino acid changes that distinguish modern humans from Neanderthals.
Dr. Atkinson's findings are consistent with the prevailing view of the origin of modern humans, known as the "out of Africa" hypothesis.
WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans
He said it is commonly thought that if modern humans could emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles, that atherosclerosis would be avoided.
The first modern humans only appeared in Africa about 200, 000 years ago.
This is evident from DNA studies that prove Neanderthals made a small but significant contribution to the genetics of many modern humans.
The first knives date back as far as 2 and a half million years ago and were crafted by early ancestors of modern humans.
Homo sapiens last shared a common ancestor with our robust cousins around 600, 000 years ago, well prior to the origin of both modern humans (see above) and Neanderthals.
Researchers have been able to trace a line between some of the earliest modern humans to settle in China and people living in the region today.
The impressions left inside some of them look similar in pattern to those made by the part of the brain which modern humans use to generate speech.
Indeed, Dr Mike Petraglia at the University of Oxford has uncovered tools in India that he says could have been made by modern humans before 60, 000 years ago.
The study also found that the pattern of phoneme usage globally mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity, which also declined as modern humans set up colonies elsewhere.
WSJ: Study Points to a Single, Original Language for All Humans
Digs show that both modern humans and Neanderthals controlled fire in a way that almost certainly means they could cook, and did so at least 200, 000 years ago.
Much hinges on whether Neanderthals, who lived in Europe from 85, 000 to 35, 000 years ago, could manage the wide variety of vowel sounds that modern humans can utter.
About 10, 000 years ago, modern humans discovered how to make knives out of copper, and around 5, 000 years ago, craftsmen in the Near East began to make them out of bronze.
In the late 1950s, he led an expedition to the Upper Arun Valley to investigate whether the mysterious Yeti might be the missing link between modern humans and their primate ancestors.
When we stand over our grills, adjusting the fire to fit the food, we stand on the shoulders of giants, even if some of them didn't share their protruding browridges with modern humans.
The research contributes to a more complex picture that has been emerging of humankind during the Late Pleistocene, the period when modern humans left Africa and started to colonise the rest of the world.
Derek Bickerton, a linguist at the University of Hawaii, argues that if pre-modern humans had had language, this would have given them the ability to share complex information, and to co-operate in sophisticated ways.
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