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Reconstruction of Homo erectus 1.6 million years ago

Photo: Martin Meissner / AP

The first early humans were probably in Europe 1.4 million years ago.

This is suggested by a layer of stone tools in an excavation site near Korolewo in the Ukraine, reports a research team in the journal Nature.

The stone tools are the oldest found so far from Homo erectus in Europe.

To date, the oldest evidence of early humans on the continent came from excavation sites in Atapuerca (Spain) and the Vallonet Cave in southern France.

They are 1.1 to 1.2 million years old.

The stone tools from Ukraine also allow us to draw conclusions about how early humans immigrated to Europe.

Researchers in Dmanisi in southern Georgia determined the age of early human bones to be 1.8 million years old.

The spatial and temporal sequence of the various finds now provides a clear indication that early humans gradually advanced into Europe from east to west.

It is possible that they came from the Levant, i.e. the countries on the coast and in the hinterland of the Eastern Mediterranean: Stone tools that are similar to the Ukrainian ones and are two to two and a half million years old were found in the Zarqa Valley in Jordan.

The hominids, which include chimpanzees as well as humans, could then have come to what is now western Ukraine either via the Caucasus or via Asia Minor.

Migrated upriver to Europe

The site near Korolewo is near the Tisza, a tributary of the Danube.

The team suspects that a group of early humans may have migrated upstream along the Danube to Europe.

However, there are still too few finds related to early humans in Europe to establish a reliable chronology.

"But for now we can say that the settlement of Korolevo around 1.4 million years ago calls into question the assumption that humans only moved to higher latitudes after the widespread colonization of southern Europe around 1.2 million years ago."

The excavation site near Korolewo was discovered in 1974 and has been studied many times since then.

"Although Korolewo's importance for the European Paleolithic is widely recognized, age limits for the lowest stone artifacts still need to be conclusively clarified," write the study authors.

To determine the age of this layer, they used two dating methods based on rare radioactive isotopes: beryllium-10 and aluminum-26.

They arise when cosmic radiation hits deposits containing quartz.

The isotopes decay very slowly and the age of a layer can be determined by their relationship to one another.

Both methods gave an age of around 1.42 million years.

If the assignment of the tools to Homo erectus is correct, Korolewo, at 48.2 degrees north latitude, would also be the northernmost place known to date where this early human species stayed.

The conditions for this were probably not bad 1.42 million ago: At that time there were three interglacial warm periods, which are among the warmest of their era.

fzs/dpa