How these stone tools from Ukraine are rewriting human history

According to one study, early humans arrived in Europe about 1.4 million years ago, significantly earlier than previously thought. This is suggested by a layer of stone tools at an excavation site near Korolewo in Ukraine, a research team reports in the journal Nature.

The earliest evidence of early humans in Europe to date, from excavations at Atapuerca (Spain) and Vallonet Cave in southern France, is 1.1 to 1.2 million years old. The group led by Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague suspects that Europe may have been populated from east to west.

The excavation site at Korolewo was discovered in 1974 and has been explored many times since. «Although the importance of Korolewo to the European Paleolithic period is widely recognized, the age limits for the lowest stone artifacts have yet to be definitively elucidated.”, the study authors write. To determine the age of this layer, they used two dating methods based on rare radioactive isotopes: beryllium-10 and aluminum-26. They are created when cosmic rays hit deposits containing quartz. The isotopes decay very slowly and the age of a layer can be determined by their relationship to each other.

Both methods gave an age of about 1.42 million years. An age determination of samples from the excavation site in Atapuerca, Spain, using one of the methods resulted in an age of 1.12 million years.

The found stone tools, which the researchers attribute to early humans of the species Homo erectus, are the oldest known to date in Europe. Although early human bones about 1.8 million years old have been found in Georgia, the Dmanisi site is located in the South Georgian Caucasus, just outside Europe.

The spatial and temporal sequence of the various finds gives researchers a clear indication that early humans gradually entered Europe from east to west. They may have come from the Levant (Middle East), where stone tools dating from two to two and a half million years old and similar to those found in Korolevo were found in Jordan’s Zarqa Valley. The hominids could then have come to what is now western Ukraine via the Caucasus or via Asia Minor (Turkey).

The location at Korolewo is close to the Tisza, a tributary of the Danube. The team suspects that a group of early humans migrated upstream along the Danube into Europe. However, there are still too few finds relating to early humans in Europe to establish a reliable chronology. “But for now we can say that the settlement of Korolevo about 1.4 million years ago challenges the assumption that humans only moved to higher latitudes after the widespread colonization of southern Europe about 1.2 million years ago.”

If the tool assignment to Homo erectus is correct, Korolewo, at 48.2 degrees north latitude, would be the northernmost known site of this early human species. The conditions for this were probably not bad 1.42 million ago: at that time there were three interglacial warm periods that were among the warmest of their epoch (early Pleistocene). (yam/sda/dpa)