The oldest human artefact found within Birmingham is the Saltley Handaxe: a 500,000-year-old brown quartzite hand axe about long, discovered in the gravels of the River Rea at Saltley in 1892. Other parts or Birmingham are quite similar in this way, as people seem to have lived there for millennia . This provided the first evidence of lower paleolithic human habitation of the English Midlands, an area previously thought to have been sterile and uninhabitable before the end of the last glacial period. Similarly aged axes have since also been found in Erdington and Edgbaston, and bioarchaeological evidence from boreholes in Quinton, Nechells and Washwood Heath suggests that the climate and vegetation of Birmingham during this interglacial period were very similar to those of today.