Archaeologists have dated an assemblage of ancient stone tools excavated from the archaeological site of Korolevo on the Tysa River in western Ukraine at 1.42 million years old. As such, these artifacts — which are associated with Homo erectus — provide the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe and support the hypothesis that the continent was colonized from the east.
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A stone tool from Korolevo I, Ukraine. Image credit: Garba et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3.
“To the east of Europe stands the key site of Dmanisi, Georgia, where layers containing hominin skull remains and stone tools are dated securely to around 1.85-1.78 million years,” said first author Dr. Roman Garba, an archaeologist with the Institute of Archaeology and the Nuclear Physics Institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues.
“A trail from Africa to Dmanisi via the Levantine corridor accords with the Mode-1 stone artifacts documented in Jordan’s Zarqa Valley, as early as around 2.5 million years ago.”
“The earliest precisely dated evidence of humans in Europe occurs at two southwestern sites: Atapuerca, Spain, where the oldest human fossils at Sima del Elefante are reported at around 1.2-1.1 million years; and Vallonnet Cave, southern France, where stone artifacts are constrained to around 1.2-1.1 million years.”
“However, the vast spatial and temporal gap that separates the Caucasus and southwestern Europe leaves key aspects of the first human dispersal into Europe largely unresolved.”
The Korolevo site was first discovered by the Ukrainian archaeologist Vladyslav Gladylin in 1974.
It lies close to where the Tysa River — a tributary of the Danube — leaves the eastern Carpathian Mountains and spreads southwestward across the Pannonian Plain.
“We know that the layer of accumulated loess and paleosol here is up to 14 m deep and contains thousands of stone artifacts. Korolevo was an important source of raw material for their production,” said co-author Dr. Vitalii Usyk, an archaeologist with the Institute of Archaeology at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
“We identified seven periods of human occupation in the stratigraphic layers, although at least nine different Paleolithic cultures were recorded at the locality: hominins lived here from 1.4 million years ago to about 30,000 years ago.”
Selected stone tools from Korolevo I, Ukraine: (a) chopper core; (b) flake with bifacial treatment; (c) multi-platform core; (d) Kombewa flake; (e) flake with parallel scar pattern. Scale bars – 3 cm. Image credit: Garba et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3.
The Korolevo stone tools were made in the Oldowan style, the most primitive form of tool-making.
“We applied two complementary dating approaches to calculate the age from the measured concentrations of cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminum-26,” said senior author Dr. John Jansen, a researcher with the Institute of Geophysics at the Czech Academy of Sciences.
“But the most precise age came from our own method based on mathematical modeling, known as P-PINI.”
“This study is the first time our new dating approach has been applied in archaeology.”
“I expect our new dating approach will have a major impact on archaeology because it can be applied to sedimentary deposits that are highly fragmented, meaning there are lots of erosional gaps.”
“In archaeology we nearly always find fragmented records, whereas the traditional long-range dating method, magnetostratigraphy, relies on more continuous records.”
First peopling of Europe: (a) archaeological sites and dispersal routes noted in the text; the maximum extent of the Eurasian ice sheets is indicated with gray dashes; blue arrows indicate possible early human dispersal routes; (b) Korolevo I, Gostry Verkh, viewed from the Beyvar hill with excavation XIII (red box), Ukraine. Image credit: Garba et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3.
According to the team, the Korolevo site is the northernmost known presence of Homo erectus.
“The radiometric dating of the first human presence at the Korolevo site not only fills in a large spatial gap between the Dmanisi site and the Atapuerca site, but also confirms the hypothesis that the first pulse of hominin dispersal into Europe came from the east or southeast,” Dr. Garba said.
“Based on a climate model and field pollen data, we have identified three possible interglacial warm periods when the first hominins could have reached Korolevo following most likely the Danube River migration corridor.”
A paper on the findings was published in the journal Nature.
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R. Garba et al. East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago. Nature, published online March 6, 2024; doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3
