They further narrowed the date with the help of fossil beetles of a species that lived only in temperatures that are quite warm. The presence of this species suggests that the region was occupied during one of the two periods between glacial advances that occurred 950,000 and 840,000 years ago.

“Collectively, this evidence provides a strong case for the Happisburgh site as the oldest uncontested site of human occupation of Europe,” said Andrew P. Roberts, an expert on paleomagnetic dating at the Australian National University. The site is known to archaeologists as the Cromer Forest-bed Formation.

But Richard G. Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, said he would like to see a better dated site closer to this age before accepting that early humans ranged so far north.

To prove that humans were present, such a site would ideally contain animal bones bearing the cut marks of stone tools. “I know this sets a high bar, and it may be an impractical standard to apply in the context of the Cromer Forest-bed, particularly where it is being exposed by wave erosion,” he said.

The makers of the flints would have been archaic humans, of a so far unknown species, whose ancestors left Africa at least a million years before the emergence of modern humans about 100,000 years ago.

Archaic humans have been documented in the Mediterranean area at this time, but their presence so far north is unexpected, said Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The new find “does tell us that hominids could tackle boreal forest environments with what seem to be pretty crude tool kits and it confirms they got that far north amazingly early,” he said.