By Joe Pinkstone For Mailonline
Published: 19:45 GMT, 19 February 2019 | Updated: 19:48 GMT, 19 February 2019
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Europe was a desolate region for Stone Age humanity if a new study is to be believed - as its researchers claim only 1,500 humans lived on the continent.
While it is known humans arrived in the region 43,000 years ago, until now there has been no official estimation of just how many people settled.
Now teams from the University of Cologne - studying archaeological evidence from a period of European prehistory called the Aurignacian, between 42,000 and 33,000 years ago - have said it could be as little as 1,500.
Their conclusions are based on the belief that only 13 regions had human life split into approximately 35 different groups of people containing 42 individuals each.
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Europe was a desolate region for Stone Age life as a study find there were only 1,500 human beings throughout the continent. People only arrived in the region 43,00 years ago and spread rapidly across the continent but it remains unknown how many people were present (file photo)
Isabell Schmidt and Andreas Zimmermann at the University of Cologne conducted the research, published in PLOS ONE.
Looking at a stretch of Europe from northern Spain in the west to Poland in the east, the researchers based their research on the location of the approximately 400
