New analysis signifies that hominins migrated into Eurasia roughly 200,000 years sooner than beforehand believed, predating the Dmanisi web site in Georgia.
Anthropologists proceed to debate when early hominins—ancestors carefully associated to trendy people—first migrated out of Africa and started their gradual unfold throughout the globe. Whereas the broadly accepted view has been that hominins reached Eurasia at the very least 1.8 million years in the past, some fragmentary proof has prompt a good earlier presence. Now, new findings from a global staff of researchers push that timeline again to almost 2 million years in the past.
This conclusion relies on a number of fossil bones bearing lower marks, found on the Grăunceanu web site in Romania. Situated within the Olteț River Valley, Grăunceanu is certainly one of a number of fossil-rich websites initially excavated within the Sixties. As a result of no hominin stays have been discovered there, researchers have relied on oblique proof of their presence, resembling stone instruments and marks left by device use on animal bones.
Greater than 5,000 bones from Grăunceanu and surrounding websites had been meticulously examined for proof of lower marks from stone instruments used to take away the flesh from animals. Of that whole, the staff recognized at the very least 20 bones they’re assured present indicators of lower marks. Biostratagraphic information and high-precision uranium-lead courting strategies had been used to estimate the age of the bones, which put their minimal age at 1.95 million years in the past.
Publication and Analysis Workforce
The findings had been revealed in Nature Communications. The international team of more than a dozen researchers was led by Sabrina Curran, an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio University; Claire Terhune, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas; and Alexandru Petculescu, of the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology in Bucharest.
Terhune noted that the team had to overcome several challenges, including the absence of hominin bones and stone tools at the site. They also had to contend with the fact that the bones were excavated more than 50 years ago, making the relationship of the bones to one another and the exact reasons for their deposition hard to determine.
The fossils are currently curated in the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology and the Museum of Oltenia. Though researchers had worked with the bones intermittently since their discovery, it was not until the last decade or so that they thought to reexamine them and conduct careful inspections of the surface of each bone.
Reassessing the Oldest Hominin Presence
“We didn’t initially expect to find much,” Curran said. “But during a routine check of the collections we found several cut-marked bones. This led to further investigation in collaboration with Dr. Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Michael Pante of Colorado State University, and the discovery of other distinct marks across different bones, suggesting deliberate butchering activities.”
Prior to this discovery, the site of Dmanisi in the country of Georgia was thought to contain the oldest evidence of hominin activity outside of Africa, dated to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Confirming the age of the marks establishes both the presence of hominins in Eurasia 200,000 years earlier than previously thought as well as tool use by them, providing some of the earliest evidence of hominin activity in this area
Reconstructing the Hominin Environment
The team combined this work with isotopic analyses led by Virgil Drăguşin from the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology that helped to reconstruct the environment these hominins would have been living in at the time. This work suggests this region would have experienced seasonal fluctuations in temperature, much like today, but that there likely would have been higher levels of rainfall. This would likely have been different from the environments these hominins were originally adapted to in Africa. Analysis of the animal fossils from the site also shows they would have encountered a range of new fauna, including wooly rhinos, saber tooth cats, pangolins, and mammoths.
“The field of paleoanthropology can be contentious,” Terhune noted. “People get really fired up about human ancestors, and one ongoing debate has been related to the earliest evidence of tool use. Because of this, we have been extremely meticulous in documenting the presence of these cut marks because we knew if we handed another paleontologist these bones, they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah these are cut marks.’ But if we told them they’re from Romania two million years ago, they’re going to say, ‘No, that can’t be right’.”
But the team is confident they got the facts right, and that the discovery is an important step forward.
“The Grăunceanu site represents a pivotal moment in our understanding of human prehistory,” Curran added. “It demonstrates that early hominins had already begun to explore and inhabit diverse environments across Eurasia, showing an adaptability that would later play a crucial role in their survival and spread.”
“The history of human evolution is far more complex and intricate than we could have imagined,” she added, “and we are just beginning to uncover the many chapters of that story.”
Reference: “Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago” by Sabrina C. Curran, Virgil Drăgușin, Briana Pobiner, Michael Pante, John Hellstrom, Jon Woodhead, Roman Croitor, Adrian Doboș, Samantha E. Gogol, Vasile Ersek, Trevor L. Keevil, Alexandru Petculescu, Aurelian Popescu, Chris Robinson, Lars Werdelin and Claire E. Terhune, 20 January 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9
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