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 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 “To the east of Europe stands the key site of Dmanisi where layers containing hominin skull remains and stone tools are dated securely to around 1.85-1.78 million years,” said first author Dr an archaeologist with the Institute of Archaeology and the Nuclear Physics Institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences “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 where the oldest human fossils at Sima del Elefante are reported at around 1.2-1.1 million years; and Vallonnet Cave where stone artifacts are constrained to around 1.2-1.1 million years.” 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 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.” Ukraine: (a) chopper core; (b) flake with bifacial treatment; (c) multi-platform core; (d) Kombewa flake; (e) flake with parallel scar pattern The Korolevo stone tools were made in the Oldowan style “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 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 “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 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 viewed from the Beyvar hill with excavation XIII (red box) 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 “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 East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago Metrics details Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout The MATLAB code used to generate burial ages with P-PINI (as shown in Fig. 4 and Supplementary Figs. 7–11) is shared at https://github.com/CosmoAarhus/Korolevo The Korolevo Palaeolithic site: research methods Korolevo un des plus anciens habitats acheuléens et moustériens de Transcarpatie soviétique Early Paleolithic of Korolevo site (Transcarpathia An isochron method for cosmogenic nuclide dating of buried soils and sediments New cosmogenic nuclide burial-dating model indicates onset of major glaciations in the Alps during Middle Pleistocene Transition Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85–1.78 Ma New dating evidence of the early presence of hominins in Southern Europe Climate effects on archaic human habitats and species successions New views on an old move: hominin migration into Eurasia Early hominins in Europe: the Galerian migration hypothesis The first human settlements out Africa into Europe: a chronological perspective Timing of Quaternary geomagnetic reversals and excursions in volcanic and sedimentary archives Bottleneck at Jaramillo for human migration to Iberia and the rest of Europe Earliest Pleistocene hominid cranial remains from Dmanisi Earliest human remains in Eurasia: new 40Ar/39Ar dating of the Dmanisi hominid-bearing levels Chronologic constraints on hominin dispersal outside Africa since 2.48 Ma from the Zarqa Valley Dating the Homo erectus bearing travertine from Kocabas (Denizli Paleolithic site of Korolevo in Transcarpathia Exploring the potential of the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic Site Korolevo II (Ukraine): new results on stratigraphy Magnetostratigraphy of the loess–palaeosol key Palaeolithic section at Korolevo (Transcarpathia Reference magnetostratigraphic sections of anthropogenic deposits of Transcarpathia [in Russian] Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR First settlements in Central Europe: between originality and banality Early and Middle Pleistocene climate-environment conditions in Central Europe and the hominin settlement record Contribution to the cognizance of raw materials and raw material regions of the Transcarpathian Palaeolithic Processing of Korolevo samples aimed at AMS determination of in situ 10Be and 26Al nuclides and their purity control using follow-up mass spectrometry scans P–PINI: a cosmogenic nuclide burial dating method for landscapes undergoing non-steady erosion in Treatise on Geochemistry 2nd edn (eds Holland New cosmogenic burial ages for Sterkfontein Member 2 Australopithecus and Member 5 Oldowan A Pliocene–Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic δ18O records Olduvai Gorge: Excavations in Beds I & II 1960–1963 Vol Southern Caucasus: raw materials and technical behaviours of Europe’s first hominins L’industrie lithique du site Pleistocene inferieur de Pirro Nord (Apricena Italie du sud): une occupation humaine entre 1.3 et 1.7 Ma The first European peopling and the Italian case: peculiarities and “opportunism” The Danube corridor hypothesis and the Carpathian Basin: geological environmental and archaeological approaches to characterizing Aurignacian dynamics An ancient continuous human presence in the Balkans and the beginnings of human settlements in western Eurasia: a lower Pleistocene example of the Lower Palaeolithic levels in Kozarnika cave (North-western Bulgaria) Faunal remains from the Oldowan site of Muhkai II in the North Caucasus: potential for dating and paleolandscape reconstruction The Early Pleistocene site of Kermek in western Ciscaucasia (southern Russia): stratigraphy biotic record and lithic industry (preliminary results) New magnetostratigraphic and numerical age of the Fuente Nueva-3 site (Guadix-Baza basin Hérault): a late Early Pleistocene archaeological occurrence in southern France The configuration of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets through the Quaternary Determination of the 10Be half-life by multicollector ICP–MS and liquid scintillation counting A new value for the half-life of 10Be by heavy-ion elastic recoil detection and liquid scintillation counting The new 6MV AMS-facility DREAMS at Dresden The first four years of the AMS-facility DREAMS: status and developments for more accurate radionuclide data Terrestrial in situ cosmogenic nuclides: theory and application Dating sediment burial with in situ-produced cosmogenic nuclides: theory Rock uplift rates in South Africa from isochron burial dating of fluvial and marine terraces Air pressure and cosmogenic isotope production Production rate calculations for cosmic-ray-muon-produced 10Be and 26Al benchmarked against geological calibration data An update on radiochemical separation techniques for the determination of long-lived radionuclides via accelerator mass spectrometry Towards more precise 10Be and 36Cl data from measurements at the 10−14 level: influence of sample preparation Attempts to understand potential deficiencies in chemical procedures for AMS: cleaning and dissolving quartz for 10Be and 26Al analysis Optimization of 10Be measurements at the 6 MV AMS facility DREAMS Download references We thank the DREAMS team at the Ion Beam Centre at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf for assistance with accelerator mass spectrometry; D Odom for providing the MATLAB code describing the isochron model; and T Fujioka for discussions about the Atapuerca sites We acknowledge the following funding: Czech Ministry of Education Youth and Sports (MEYS) (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000728); RADIATE (Horizon 2020 824096) transnational access (21002366-ST); RADIATE guest researcher programme; MEYS (LM2018120); Czech Science Foundation (22-13190S); and Charles University Grant Agency (310222) Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv The authors declare no competing interests Nature thanks Darryl Granger and the other reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations which include background on the archaeology of Korolevo Supplementary References and computer code availability details a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law Download citation DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3 Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content: a shareable link is not currently available for this article Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science John Jansen currently receives funding from the Czech Science Foundation and the Chengdu University of Technology where he is visiting professor He also holds two unsalaried positions: visiting senior fellow at the University of Wollongong and associate editor with the Geological Society of America Bulletin View all partners Long before it emerged as the epicentre of global colonialism Europe was itself colonised for the first time by humans migrating from the east A new study, led by a team from the Czech Academy of Sciences and Aarhus University and published this week in Nature, reports the earliest human presence in Europe, at a site on the Tysa River in western Ukraine known as Korolevo We studied a layer of stone tools left on a river bed by the people who crafted them. These “core-and-flake” tools were made in the Oldowan style, the most primitive form of tool-making, first classified by the palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey in east Africa Similar tools have also been found at the oldest known sites of human occupation in Europe The tools at Korolevo had been buried by river sediment and later by wind-blown dust and then eventually uncovered by workers at a stone quarry Evidence of prehistoric people at this site was first discovered in 1974 by the Ukrainian archaeologist Early efforts to date the tools proved troublesome. Measurements of remnant magnetism in the overlying sediments indicated that the lowermost tools predate the most recent reversal in the Earth’s magnetic field 0.8 million years ago, an event known as the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal This timing is well beyond the limits of commonly used dating methods such as radiocarbon (useful back to about 50 thousand years) and luminescence dating (usually limited to the last 300 thousand years or so) It works like this: exploding stars (supernovae) outside our Solar System release streams of cosmic rays that enter Earth’s upper atmosphere sending showers of secondary cosmic rays down to Earth where they react with minerals in rocks and soils to produce radioactive nuclides in tiny but measurable quantities We measured two such nuclides, beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 A date was obtained by observing the ratio of these two nuclides which changes over time during burial due to their differing radioactive decay half-lives: 1.4-million-years for beryllium-10 and 0.7-million-years for aluminium-26 By applying this approach to the sediment layer containing the stone tools at Korolevo, we were able to calculate a burial age of 1.5 to 1.3 million years (the 1-sigma uncertainty range) making this Europe’s earliest securely dated human occupation The absence of fossils at Korolevo means we cannot definitively say who these pioneers were. However, the tools are too old and too primitive to be the work of either anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens), or Neanderthals. The tool makers were likely some variety of Homo erectus a remarkably successful ancestor of humans that appeared around 2 million years ago and spread across diverse habitats in Africa On their journey from Africa into Eurasia, early humans passed through the Levant region, where they left signs of occupation as early as 2.5 million years ago at Zarqa Valley. Further north, numerous Homo erectus fossils have been found at Dmanisi in the Caucasus Mountains One proposal is that people entered Europe from the east via the Danube Valley and Pannonian Plain Korolevo is the northernmost known presence of whom we assume to be Homo erectus Our burial age of around 1.4 million years ago corresponds to three interglacial periods that were among the warmest of the last few million years We propose that people exploited these warm intervals to disperse into higher latitudes The intervening glacial periods in this region were bitterly cold, ruling out any possibility of a suitable habitat for humans We reason that climate was a major influence on human behaviour back then Our discovery in Ukraine adds a new and unexpected layer to the story of Europe Differing opinions on the meaning of these ancient tools will no doubt arise not least because their discovery in such a contested location brings questions of human history directly into the geopolitical firing line And yet an alternative view also exists. It is one that marvels at human enterprise and reminds of the common ground from which all humanity sprang: a salve for transcending these dark times a site in Ukraine where early humans made stone tools suggesting early humans moved from Ukraine into the rest of Europe By Michael Le Page Molecular dating has revealed that an area in Ukraine was occupied by humans 1.4 million years ago making it one of the oldest hominin sites in Europe and possibly the oldest A large number of stone tools have been found buried in layers of sediment beside an outcrop of volcanic rock suitable to be made into tools Read more Human evolution: The astounding new story of the origin of our species “This was like a magnet for bringing the people there, and they were camping nearby,” says Roman Garba at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague No bones have been found as the soil is too acidic to preserve them, he says, but it is assumed that the hominins were Homo erectus, a species that evolved around 2 million years ago and spread from Africa to Europe and Asia While it has been clear that early hominins were present at the Korolevo site repeatedly over hundreds of thousands of years we haven’t known exactly when they were present But Garba’s team has now dated the oldest layer containing tools to 1.4 million years ago using a technique called cosmogenic nuclide dating Keep up with advances in archaeology and evolution with our subscriber-only This method relies on cosmic rays that are so energetic that they can split the nuclei of atoms and generate unusual isotopes as these cosmic rays don’t penetrate far into solid objects radioactive isotopes generated by cosmic rays decay into other isotopes allowing the time of burial to be determined Another early hominin site in Dmanisi in Georgia has been dated to 1.7 million years ago, while other sites in France and Spain are around 1.2 million years old. This suggests that early humans moved from Africa through Georgia and into Ukraine though it is also possible that some crossed the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey It has been suggested that some hominins crossed the Gibraltar Strait to reach Spain when sea levels were lower than present While part of Georgia is in Europe geographically and the whole country is seen as part of Europe politically the site of Dmanisi is geographically located in Asia So he and his team regard Korolevo as the oldest human site in Europe that has been reliably dated the earliest securely dated hominin presence in Europe,” the paper states “I agree that the new age estimates are important, and they support the idea of an early east-west dispersal,” says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London But this was already apparent because four other sites in western Europe have already been dated to around 1.4 million years ago Garba says that while it is possible that these other sites are as old, the dating of them is questionable Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3 Homo erectus may have crafted these stone tools 1.4 million years ago in what is now Ukraine Scientists analyzed finds from the archaeological site of Korolevo in western Ukraine where researchers have unearthed stone tools from the Paleolithic (2.6 million to 10,500 years ago) since the site's discovery in 1974.  The oldest artifacts at Korolevo were stone tools left on a riverbed and had been made in the Oldowan style the most primitive form of human tool-making Similar tools have been found at the oldest known sites of human occupation in Africa The artifacts at Korolevo had been buried by river sediment and later by wind-blown dust Previous research failed to precisely date the oldest artifacts at Korolevo. In the new study, scientists employed a technique called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating, which relies on cosmic rays — high-energy particles that constantly bombard Earth from outer space Cosmic rays can trigger nuclear reactions inside rocks on the surface creating radioactive isotopes (different versions of elements) that are normally extremely rare on Earth As these so-called cosmogenic nuclides are formed when these rocks are exposed at the surface but not when buried underground researchers can analyze levels of different cosmogenic nuclides to estimate when they were buried Related: Our mixed-up human family: 8 human relatives that went extinct (and 1 that didn't) The 1.4 million-year-old stone tools from Korolevo are the oldest known from Europe.(Image credit: Roman Garba)A researcher explores the archaeological area between Gostry Verkh and Beyvar hills in Ukraine.(Image credit: Roman Garba)Study lead author Roman Garba at Korolevo I in Ukraine.(Image credit: Roman Garba.) The earliest stone tools at Korolevo may be about 1.4 million years old the scientists found — meaning the site contains the earliest known evidence of hominins in Europe Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox "Confidently dated early hominin sites are scarce in Europe," Toshiyuki Fujioka a senior researcher of cosmogenic nuclide dating at Spain's National Research Center on Human Evolution who did not participate in this study "This study provides a much-needed reliably dated chronological site to add fuel to our discussion on ancient human migration."  an extinct human species that first appeared in Africa about 2 million years ago and later spread to Asia and Europe "Korolevo is the northernmost outpost found so far of what we presume to be Homo erectus, and is testimony to the intrepidness of this ancestor," study co-author John Jansen a senior researcher at the Czech Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geophysics in Prague "It's possible sites even farther north lie deeply buried or were destroyed by glaciers." Korolevo is located midway between those sites in Asia and Europe and the evidence now suggests that hominins may have colonized Europe from east to west "The age of the stone tools at Korolevo confirms a long-held hypothesis regarding the direction from which Europe was first colonized," Jansen said One potential route for hominins westward from Ukraine would have been across the Pannonian Basin in southeast Central Europe Related: Humans faced a 'close call with extinction' nearly a million years ago director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage An archived photo of the Transcarpathian Palaeolithic Expedition in 1984 and 1985.(Image credit: Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.)Archaeologists at the excavation site in the 1980's.(Image credit: Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.)Still "I think this new paper nicely fills a gaping hole in our current knowledge of early human migrations into Europe," Roberts said "More well-dated sites are needed to increase our confidence in when Europe was first colonized and by which routes." —Europe's last hunter-gatherers had sophisticated societies that helped them avoid inbreeding —When did Homo sapiens first appear? —45,000-year-old bones unearthed in cave are oldest modern-human remains in Central Europe  glaciers retreated to reveal new landscapes for early humans to explore The oldest artifacts at Korolevo were buried during three interglacials that were among the warmest of the past few million years which could help explain why the hominins that made them were able to disperse so far north Although 1.4 million years ago marked a warm period in that region, its northern location still would have experienced a great deal of variability across the seasons, Michael Petraglia director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University who did not participate in this study This means "the Korolevo evidence suggests that early hominins were behaviorally more flexible in their adaptations than previously recognized," he said Ancient jawbone dredged off Taiwan seafloor belongs to mysterious Denisovan, study finds Secret 'drug room' full of psychedelic 'snuff tubes' discovered at pre-Inca site in Peru Mysterious Tikal altar that wasn't Maya after all includes at least 4 skeletons — and 1 was a child , opens new tab.Homo erectus was the first member of our evolutionary lineage with body proportions similar to our species were fashioned in what is called the Oldowan style While quite simple - flaked tools such as choppers scrapers or basic cutting instruments - they represent the dawn of human technology.Until now the oldest-known evidence of humans in Europe was about 1.2-1.1 million years old from a site called Atapuerca in Spain.The Korolevo findings provide insight into the route of the first human expansion into Europe Homo erectus fossils from 1.8 million years ago are known from a Caucasus site in Georgia called Dmanisi this suggests Homo erectus entered Europe from the east or southeast Garba said."Korolevo is the northernmost outpost found so far of what we presume to be Homo erectus and is testimony to the intrepidness of this ancestor," Czech Academy of Sciences geoscientist and study co-author John Jansen added.It has been notoriously difficult to determine the age of Paleolithic sites like Korolevo by determining when the layer bearing the artifacts was buried under overlaying sediment."Earth is constantly bombarded by galactic cosmic rays When these rays - mainly protons and alpha particles - penetrate Earth's atmosphere they generate a secondary shower of particles - neutrons and muons - that penetrates into the subsurface," geoscientist and study co-author Mads Knudsen of Aarhus University in Denmark said.These particles react with minerals in rocks to produce radioactive nuclides The sediment was dated based on the ratio of two nuclides thanks to their differing pace of radioactive decay.Europe was later colonized by other now-extinct human species including Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals Homo sapiens evolved in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago arriving in significant numbers in Europe perhaps around 40,000-45,000 years ago.The Homo erectus pioneers encountered a Europe inhabited by large mammals including mammoths hyenas and saber-toothed cats."Most likely they were scavengers looking for carcasses left by hyenas or other predators but what attracted them to Korolevo was a source of high-quality volcanic rock very good for making stone tools," Garba said.The researchers suspect evidence of European human occupation even older than Korolevo will turn up."The question is not 'if' but 'when' we will find a site of similar or older age somewhere else in Ukraine Bulgaria or Serbia," Garba said.Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab , opens new tab Browse an unrivalled portfolio of real-time and historical market data and insights from worldwide sources and experts. , opens new tabScreen for heightened risk individual and entities globally to help uncover hidden risks in business relationships and human networks. © 2025 Reuters. All rights reserved LBV Magazine English Edition New findings from an international team led by Roman Garba from the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences have confirmed that the oldest known human occupation in Europe occurred 1.4 million years ago near the town of Korolevo in western Ukraine the earliest inhabited site in Europe was thought to be Atapuerca in Spain shows that early hominids were able to colonize Europe from the east or southeast by taking advantage of warm interglacial periods Our ancestor Homo erectus was the first hominin to leave Africa around 2 million years ago The dating of the first human presence at Korolevo not only fills a major geographic gap between sites in Georgia and Spain but confirms the hypothesis that the initial dispersal of hominins into Europe came from the east or southeast located in the Zakarpattia region near the borders of Romania and Hungary is believed to be the northernmost known Homo erectus site in the world It contains thousands of stone tools but no fossils the dating confirms Homo erectus occupied the area 1.4 million years ago we identified three possible warm interglacial periods when the first hominins could have reached Korolevo likely following the Danube River migration corridor Korolevo is important for all of Europe as we know the loess and paleosol layers here are up to 14 meters deep and contain thousands of stone artifacts explained Ukrainian archaeologist Vitalii Usyk a co-author who worked on the Korolevo excavations We identified seven periods of human occupation in the stratified layers with at least nine different Paleolithic cultures represented – hominins lived here from 1.4 million years ago until around 30,000 years ago To conclusively date the oldest stone tools required expertise from nuclear physics and geophysics Researchers chemically processed rock samples from the lowest archaeological layer and used accelerator mass spectrometry to measure concentrations of cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 nucleides The ratio of these nucleides enabled calculating how long the rocks were buried This is the first time our new isochron-burial dating method has been applied in archaeology as it can date highly fragmented sediment records which are common in archaeology whereas traditional long-range dating relies on more continuous records The multidisciplinary research integrated knowledge from archaeology geophysics and climate science to reveal new insights into the earliest human history of Europe Institute of Archaeology of Czech Academy of Sciences | Garba, R., Usyk, V., Ylä-Mella, L. et al. East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago. Nature (2024). doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3 Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email Archaeologists from universities in the United States and Denmark found deep within the Actun Uayazba Kab cave in Belize two small stone tools dated between 250 and 900 AD that… men and women gathered to play a game called Cuju A team of researchers has succeeded in recreating for the first time in a laboratory experiment a phenomenon that until now only existed as a theory in the realm of… the Cantonal Archaeology of Aargau carried out a rescue excavation between early May 2024 and the end of March 2025 The Egyptian archaeological mission affiliated with the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced the discovery of a group of defensive structures and a system of moats that could indicate… In the southeastern area of the city of Rome archaeologists excavating inside the Triton Baths within the monumental complex of the Villa di Sette… Why did some animals from ancient eras become fossils while others simply disappeared without a trace A recent study on the cave paintings of the Altamira Cave in Santillana del Mar Cantabria (Spain) has concluded that some of the artworks it contains could be much older… A team of paleontologists from the University of Leicester has managed to decipher one of the many enigmas of the dinosaur era—the exact moment when pterosaurs Rome achieved numerous military victories that allowed it to grow and dominate nearly the entire known world in Antiquity Receive our news and articles in your email for free You can also support us with a monthly subscription and receive exclusive content This photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows a heavily weathered flake artifact at the Korolevo I archaeological site in western Ukraine in August 2023 Stone tools found in the area are the earliest evidence of early human presence in Europe according to research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday This photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows the Gostry Verkh area of the Korolevo I archaeological site in western Ukraine in August 2023 This photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows the Loess-palaeosol sequence between the Gostry Verkh and and Beyvar hills areas of the Korolevo I archaeological site in western Ukraine in August 2023 This photo provided by researcher Roman Garba shows a notched stone tool made from local volcanic raw material (glassy dacite) at the Korolevo I archaeological site in western Ukraine in August 2023 with the Korolevo II site behind a body of water were excavated from a quarry in Korolevo in the 1970s Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than 1 million years old “This is the earliest evidence of any type of human in Europe that is dated,” said Mads Faurschou Knudsen a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of the new study He said it’s not certain which early human ancestors fashioned the tools the first species to walk upright and master the use of fire an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author The chipped stone tools were likely used for cutting meat and perhaps scraping animal hides The researchers suggest the tools may be as old as 1.4 million years but other experts say the study methodology suggests that they may be just over 1 million years old placing them in roughly the same date range as other ancient tools unearthed in Spain The very earliest stone tools of this type were found in eastern Africa and date back to 2.8 million years ago who directs the Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program The Ukraine site is significant because “it’s the earliest site that far north,” suggesting that the early humans who dispersed from Africa with these tools were able to survive in diverse environments “The oldest humans with this old stone tool technology were able to colonize everywhere from warm Iberia (Spain) to Ukraine where it’s at least seasonally very cold – that’s an amazing level of adaptability,” said Potts The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group The AP is solely responsible for all content New Study ShowsDiscovery of early human activity in Ukraine 1.4 million years ago shows northern penetration much earlier than thought 2024Get email notification for articles from Ruth Schuster FollowMar 6 There is a new contender and he lived in Ukraine there was already an early human presence in Eurasia bypassing the heated arguments over their classification as Homo erectus or something entirely more primitive it's not even agreed to this day if Homo georgicus was one archaic human species or more than one Homo georgicus was tiny, about the size of a chimpanzee, with a small brain. In any case, whatever it was, there is agreement that they are the earliest known hominins outside of Africa The second-oldest hominin beyond Africa was recently unearthed in the Jordan Valley, Israel: a juvenile from 1.5 million years ago. Unlike Homo georgicus, it was large-bodied (as we are) strengthening the hypothesis that more than one species of archaic human had exited Africa Open gallery viewArchive photo from the 1984-1985 Transcarpathian Palaeolithic expedition.Credit: Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian Academy of SciencesSpecifically the team analyzed the earliest layers of stone tools at Korolevo which are the ones we have dated in the new study that strongly resemble the oldest tools found in Africa," explains Prof geosciences professor at Denmark's Aarhus University "They also resemble the tools found in Zarqa Valley in Jordan and at Dmanisi in the Caucasus." Korolevo is 2,300 kilometers (1,430 miles) northwest of Dmanisi which according to the team isn't in Europe whatever the European Union and Eurovision say: it's east of Europe the Caucasus is traditionally not considered part of Europe because it is located close to the Levantine Corridor and in an area with many old archaeological sites," Knudsen explains Europe loosely defined refers to Europe west of Russia and north of Turkey The site at Dmanisi is definitely securely dated – that is not a problem in this study." no human remains have been found at Korolevo So it's hard to say what early human variant may have been there The site had been occupied for a very long time: from early hominin to (apparently) Neanderthals to the great and mighty Homo sapiens itself Previous suggested dates for the earliest tools there maxed out at about 950,000 years The new analysis dates them to about 1.42 million years the earliest hominin known in Eurasia remains Homo georgicus in Dmanisi 1.5 million years and not in Europe either (That 300,000-year difference strongly indicates they weren't the same species and that there were multiple exits from Africa Open gallery viewStone tool possibly from Layer VII at Korolevo I. Surface find.Credit: Roman GarbaThe third-oldest hominin was thought to be in Barranco del León in Spain, which houses a hominin tooth at least 1.4 million years old, according to the original reports then their securely-dated Korolevo hominin is the third-oldest hominin outside Africa (Knudsen notes that separate research suggests the Vallonnet remains may be around 0.9 million years old.) Asked why Muttoni's arguments supporting late occupation of western Europe and Europe might apply to the Spanish and other sites but not to Korolevo they had "not used the methods now required to obtain robust and reliable ages which also provide realistic assessment of the uncertainties and test the underlying assumptions." Possibly some of these sites are as old as Korolevo "but we can't say for sure because the quality of the age constraints is too poor." Who might have lived in Korolevo 1.4 million years ago? If Homo erectus it would be the northernmost ones known to date The team also looked at the climatic conditions because stone tool evidence of hominins at Korolevo spans hundreds of thousands of years site last summer.Credit: Roman GarbaIn short the accruing evidence supports early human occupation of Europe from the east The finds at Korolevo bridge the spatial and temporal gap between the Caucasus about 1.8 million years ago and finds in southwestern Europe from 1.2-1.1 million years ago How did this ancient migration scenario play out dispersal from Africa via the Levant (i.e. up the Lebanon coast and continuing); then through to Asia Minor the Danube corridor and thence to the Pannonian Basin in Hungary A juvenile cranium (upper skull fragment) found in Kocabas from at least 1.1 million years ago could suggest another route the absence of hominin fossils at Korolevo prevent certitude Open gallery viewStone tool possibly from Layer VII at Korolevo I Surface find.Credit: Roman GarbaOr could it be despite constraints to early occupation of Europe suggested by critics that the Ukrainian hominin is indeed very early and very old but the others are also valid and such hominins may have been wider spread than has been thought at that time or probably even likely in the sense that these early humans may have been present elsewhere in southeastern Europe 1.4 million years ago (probably not southwestern Europe but perhaps just for very short periods of time," Knudsen responds "Maybe they died out and retreated toward Turkey or the Caucasus before new waves toward Europe started later It may have been a short occupation in Europe 1.4 million years ago." Early humans were already considered to be "flexible generalists," lending to their descendants' eventual conquest of the planet but being that far north 1.4 million years ago "provokes some rethinking," the team says And could it be that these ancient beings ventured even farther north perhaps kitted out in some form of footwear and garb Open gallery viewLoess-palaeosol sequence between Gostry Verkh and Beyvar hills in Ukraine.Credit: Roman GarbaPossibly the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet extended as far south as the Carpathians at least twice over the last 500,000 years and crushed everything in its path Early hominin sites further north than the Carpathians are toast A growing pile of evidence that there were a lot of early human species and that they beetled about possibly venturing farther than we thought As Garba and the team write: "We recognize that hominin dispersal surely did not unfold as a unidirectional march from A to B." And the whole picture could change again as more hominin evidence is found the thesis that early humans didn't spread to the higher latitudes until the conditions became relatively more clement Logging out of EU Login will log you out of any other services that use your EU Login account Use the CORDIS log out button to remain logged in on other services This is a machine translation provided by the European Commission’s eTranslation service to help you understand this page. Please read the conditions of use The oldest human presence in Europe has been found in Ukraine Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/450208-stone-tools-rewriting-history-of-first-humans-in-europe Your booklet {{ title }} generated on {{ timestamp }} is available for download The file will remain available for {{ hours }} hours The oldest known human settlement in Europe lies near the town of Korolevo as indicated by new research conducted by an international team including scientists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (AV CR) the earliest inhabited site was thought to be in current Spain published on Wednesday in the journal Nature suggests that the first humans colonised Europe from east to west The discovery of Korolevo marks its 50th anniversary this year but the precise dating of the samples has been made possible by the recent advance in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics Previous research has identified the first settlement of the European continent in Atapuerca But the current research has confirmed that the Ukrainian settlement existed 200,000 to 300,000 years earlier in the present-day Transcarpathian Ukraine near the borders with Hungary and Romania is also notable as the northernmost known discovery of an upright human species called Homo erectus The published results change the view of the migration routes of the so-called first Europeans was the first to leave Africa around two million years ago and head for the Middle East The radiometric dating of the first settlement at the Korolevo site not only fills a large spatial gap between Georgia and Spain with the oldest areas to date but also confirms the hypothesis that the first wave of European settlement penetrated from east to west,” wrote the study’s main author Roman Garba of the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of AV CR The Korolevo archaeological site is significant on a pan-European scale “We know that the layer of silty sphagnum and palaeopods here reaches a depth of up to 14 metres Korolevo was an important source of raw material for their production,” said Vitaly Usyk a Ukrainian archaeologist and co-author of the study who participated in the excavations at Korolevo and now works at the AV CR Institute of Archaeology “Seven periods of occupation are represented at the particular site under study although at least nine different Palaeolithic cultures have been recorded at the site: people lived here from the earliest ages until 30,000 years ago,” he added The archaeologists and anthropologists were able to confirm their hypotheses with the knowledge and technological capabilities of nuclear physics and geophysical sciences Samples of stone boulders from the Korolevo site were chemically processed and measured by scientists from the Czech Republic and Germany at the Helmholtz Center’s research institute scientists from the AV CR Institute of Geophysics determined the age of the samples The Korolevo archaeological site is unique in its record of waves of settlement over the past 1.4 million years “Such a site would deserve to be inscribed on the World Heritage List and we would like to start negotiations and work on the necessary documentation It is located in the area of a quarry with active andesite mining,” Garba said The Korolevo archaeological site is located about 150 kilometres from Kosice in eastern Slovakia Between 1920 and 1938 it was part of the former Czechoslovakia and the site was called Kralovo nad Tisou The first discoveries of settlements from the earlier Stone Age (Palaeolithic) in Transcarpathian Ukraine were made by the Czechoslovak archaeologist Jozef Skutil The current research was carried out under a contract between the AV CR Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences signed in 2021 The project was supported by the European Commission the Czech Science Foundation and the Grant Agency of Charles University Advertise with us Privacy Policy Brno Daily is a Czech media outlet for expats Our partners Stone tools found buried deep in the sediment of the Korolevo quarry in Ukraine are rewriting the history of human migration The seemingly unassuming chunks of rock are tools once used by Homo erectus and new dating reveals they represent the earliest evidence of hominid habitation on the European continent "Previously it was thought that our earliest ancestors could not survive in colder, more northerly latitudes without the use of fire or complex stone tool technology," says archaeologist Andy Herries of La Trobe University in Australia "Yet here we have evidence of Homo erectus living further north than ever previously documented at this early time period." Which is all to say that human history is looking a lot more complicated than we had previously credited and our understanding thereof has some serious holes Our models are largely based on stone tools since they – along with some scanty bone traces and a few other robust artifacts – are among the few traces capabile of surviving through the eons Yet stone artifacts don't come stamped with a production date leaving researchers to rely on surrounding clues to determine their age and place in history The Korolevo archaeological site is a spectacular one It reaches a depth of 14 meters (46 feet) of layers that have accumulated over time from which thousands of artifacts have been excavated The site has known at least seven separate periods of hominid occupation across at least nine Paleolithic cultures up until about 30,000 years ago But there are no biological remains at the site which rules out the usual the typical method of radiocarbon dating any nearby organic materials Over the decades since the tools' discovery Fortunately recent advances have finally allowed for precision dating of buried rock and this is what a team led by archaeologist Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences turned to "To answer the questions posed by archaeology and anthropology, we need to utilize the methods of both nuclear physics and geophysics," Garba says The technique they used is called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating which makes use of the fact material exposed on the surface is bombarded with cosmic rays By comparing the decays of specific atomic nuclei it's possible to measure the amount of time that's passed since the object last saw the sky "At the Korolevo site, we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, which have different half-lives," Garba explains "These nuclides accumulate in the quartz grains when the rock is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from space but they begin to decay when they become buried in the ground The ratio of the two varies according to how long the clasts were buried beneath the ground surface This allows us to calculate their age since burial." The team also used their own mathematical-based modeling to determine the age of the sediment layers the first time this method has been used for archaeological dating The earliest age they obtained using this method was 1.42 million years The dating of the artifacts has allowed the researchers to fill in some of the gaps in the history of human migration. Their research shows that Homo erectus was in Europe by 1.4 million years ago, having migrated through Asia 1.8 million years ago. The oldest known Homo erectus fossil dates to 2 million years ago found in fragments in a cave in South Africa and painstakingly pieced together Obviously there are still a lot of things we don't know "It remains to be seen whether this was part of a more extensive and as yet undiscovered occupation of Europe at this time," Herries says The research has been published in Nature Deliberately fashioned chipped stones date back more than 1m years and may have been used by homo erectus Ancient stone tools found in western Ukraine may offer the oldest known evidence of the presence of humans in Europe Archaeologists used new methods to date the layers of sedimentary rock surrounding the tools to more than 1m years old “This is the earliest evidence of any type of human in Europe that is dated,” said Mads Faurschou Knudsen, a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature He said it was not certain which early human ancestors fashioned the tools, but it may have been Homo erectus, the first species to walk upright and master the use of fire. “We don’t have fossil remains, so we can’t be sure,” said Roman Garba, an archaeologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences and co-author. The chipped stone tools were likely used for cutting meat and perhaps scraping animal hides, he said. Read moreThe researchers say the tools may be as much as 1.4m years old but other experts say the study methodology suggests that they may be just over 1m years old The earliest stone tools of this type yet found were unearthed in eastern Africa and date back to 2.8m years ago who directs the Smithsonian Institution’s human origins programme The Ukraine site is significant because “it’s the earliest site that far north” suggesting that the early humans who dispersed from Africa with these tools were able to survive in diverse environments “The oldest humans with this old stone tool technology were able to colonise everywhere from warm Iberia [Spain] to Ukraine CAS Prague Institute of ArchaeologyA researcher stands at Korolevo the site of the oldest known European settlement Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known European settlement in western Ukraine Homo erectus inhabited the region near Korolevo A recent study of these tools revealed that hominins expanded into Europe hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously suspected The study was made possible by technology that holds incredible promise for analyzing future archaeological discoveries CAS Prague Institute of ArchaeologyA researcher holds a stone tool in Korolevo The discovery of the stone tools at Korolevo dates back to the 1970s when researchers near the Tysa River in the Carpathian foothills discovered the artifacts technology had not developed enough to accurately date them efforts by 10 research institutions across the globe determined the stone tools were 1.4 million years old Research methods involved analyzing the age of sediment layers containing the stone tools — a tactic that gives insight into how early humans spread into Europe during the interglacial period Scientists believe that the tools were created by Homo erectus a species of early human that first appeared 2 million years ago and went extinct roughly 100,000 years ago This finding is significant for understanding how hominins first came to Europe the oldest known settlement in Europe was Atapuerca in Spain but Korolevo predates Atapuerca by 200,000 to 300,000 years researchers are confident that hominins first traveled into Europe from the east CAS Prague Institute of ArchaeologyA map showing the migration of hominins through Europe “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,” Garba added Not only did the discovery at Korolevo reveal exciting details about early hominid migration but it also used a new dating technique that could change the field of archaeology researchers analyzed the tools using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) “At the Korolevo site,” Garba explained in the CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology’s press release “we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 which have different half-lives… These nuclides accumulate in the quartz grains when the rock is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from the space but they begin to decay when they become buried in the ground.” “The ratio of the two varies according to how long the clasts were buried beneath the ground surface,” Garba continued “This allows us to calculate their age since burial.” CAS Prague Institute of ArchaeologyThe stone tools found at the site researchers John Jansen from the CAS Institute of Geophysics and Mads Knudsen from Aarhus University in Denmark implemented a new mathematical modeling technique “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,” Jansen noted in the press release archaeologists have now filled in yet another piece in the puzzle of early human history After reading about the oldest known European settlement, discover the stories of nine of the oldest structures in the world. Then, read about the Neanderthals a hominin species that disappeared 40,000 years ago Cosmos » Archaeology The oldest firmly dated evidence of human ancestors in Europe has been found at a 1.4-million-year-old site in Ukraine extinct human relatives and our direct ancestors – are believed to have made it into Eurasia 1 to 2 million years ago But nailing down the precise timeline and direction of travel out of Africa has proven difficult due to scarce fossil remains from this period Finding the oldest evidence of ancient humans in Ukraine helps build a better picture of migration into Eurasia The findings from Ukraine are detailed in a study published in Nature is among the most northern examples of early Palaeolithic (Early Stone Age) sites in the world but its exact age has been a mystery until now Palaeolithic stone tools have been found at the Korolevo site since the 1970s Researchers analysed the sediment around where the stone tools were buried They examined the cosmogenic nuclides in the rocks Cosmogenic nuclides are rare forms of atomic nuclei formed because of bombardment by high-energy rays from space they were able to determine that the Korolevo tools were buried about 1.42 million years ago It is assumed that the tools belonged to Homo erectus The authors say their findings bridge a gap between other ancient human finds in the Caucus (1.85–1.78 million years ago) and southwestern Europe (1.2–1.1 million years ago) This supports the hypothesis that ancient humans entered Europe from the east not via a land bridge to what is today the Iberian peninsula or across the sea to southern Europe Also included was an analysis of habitat changes over the past 2 million years The authors write  their study “suggests that early hominins exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and sites such as Korolevo well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition (MPT).” The MPT saw a shift in the cycle of “Ice Ages” from 40,000 years to 100,000 years the authors say this could be the farthest north early hominin site that we are likely to find “We note that there is a low likelihood of finding early European hominin sites even farther north—not because they did not exist but because the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet extended as far south as the Carpathians on at least two occasions in the last half a million years,” they write “Early hominin sites farther north are likely either to be destroyed or to lie deeply buried.” This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page The precise dating of Korolevo’s earliest occupation was made possible by recent advances in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics Such unique results could not otherwise have been achieved without implementing a multidisciplinary approach and the synergy of all the scientific disciplines involved “To answer the questions posed by archaeology and anthropology we need to utilise the methods of both nuclear physics and geophysics,” Roman Garba explains The precise dating of Korolevo’s earliest occupation by hominins was made possible by a recent advance in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics.R. Garba @romangarba, lead author of the study, sums up the findings and dating method used to determine the… pic.twitter.com/FmD9mGjWNK The Ukrainian traceThe archaeological site of Korolevo is located in Zakarpattia Oblast the area was part of the former Czechoslovakia Ukrainian archaeologists have been investigating the site for several decades and it is a very important archaeological site on a European scale “The layer of accumulated loess and palaeosols here reaches a depth of up to 14 metres and contains thousands of stone tools. Korolevo was an important source of raw material for their production,” says Ukrainian archaeologist and co-author of the study, Vitaly Usyk “Seven periods of human occupation are represented in the stratigraphic layers at the Korolevo site and at least nine different Palaeolithic cultures have been recorded here: hominins lived here from the earliest times until about 30,000 years ago,” adds the Ukrainian researcher who due to the war situation in his home country is currently working at the Institute of Archaeology of the CAS in Brno The first hominins came to Europe from Africa via the Middle East Sites with radiometrically securely dated evidence of the oldest human settlements in Europe include Atapuerca in Spain (1.2–1.1 million years ago) and Vallonnet in southern France (1.2–1.1 million years ago) even older evidence of human presence is provided by the finds at the Korolevo site in Ukraine (1.4 million years ago) Cosmic rays and nuclear physics in the service of archaeologyThe researchers chemically processed the cobble-sized clast samples from the Korolevo site and then analysed them by accelerator mass spectrometry at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf an AMS laboratory was also opened by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the CAS in Řež which would have made it possible to conduct the measurements in the Czech Republic but at the time of the analysis of the samples the equipment was not yet available for use) we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 which have different half-lives These nuclides accumulate in the quartz grains when the rock is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from space This allows us to calculate their age since burial,” Garba explains The scientists then used their own method based on mathematical modelling, known as P-PINI, to determine the age of the sediment layers. “This study is the first time our new dating approach has been applied in archaeology,” notes John Jansen from the Institute of Geophysics of the CAS Where the first humans came fromThe new study changes the view of the dispersal routes of the first populations of the genus Homo was the first of the hominins to leave Africa about two million years ago and head for the Middle East The radiometric dating of the first human presence at the Korolevo site not only fills in a large spatial gap between the Dmanisi site in Georgia and Atapuerca in Spain but also confirms the hypothesis that the first pulse of hominin dispersal into Europe came from the east or southeast,” Garba explains The lithic artefacts and a clast of quartzite from the oldest loess and palaeosol sediment layer of the Korolevo site in Transcarpathia The research was carried out on the basis of an agreement signed between the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS and the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine In addition to the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS and the Institutes of Archaeology of the CAS in Brno and Prague the Czech research institutions involved were the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology of the Faculty of Science Charles University and the Czech Geological Survey Foreign partners of the research are the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Germany) and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv The prehistory of the modern human beyond the Nile River The first migrations of populations of the Homo genus from Africa occurred around two million years ago crossed what is now the Arabian Peninsula towards Asia (eastward) and Europe (westward) where it diversified and evolved over the next hundreds of thousands of years it evolved into a distinctive variant of Homo neanderthalensis the anatomically modern human (Homo sapiens) appeared neanderthalensis began to die out some 50,000 years ago unable to adapt to climate change and unable to compete with the African H Read more about the history of the human species in our article “Anthropologist Viktor Černý in search of modern human origins” which focuses on the research of genetic traces of the anatomically modern human Prepared by: Leona Matušková, External Relations Division, CAO of the CAS, drawing on the press release of the CASTranslated by: Tereza Novická The text and photos labeled (CC) are released for use under the Creative Commons licence The primary mission of the CAS is to conduct research in a broad spectrum of natural, technical and social sciences as well as humanities This research aims to advance progress of scientific knowledge at the international level the specific needs of the Czech society and the national culture Prof. Eva Zažímalová has started her second term of office in May 2021 and a Professor of Plant Anatomy and Physiology She is also a part of GCSA of the EU.