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The discovery of stone tools buried deep in the sediments of Ukraine’s Korolevo quarry is rewriting the history of human migration.
This seemingly unassuming chunk of rock was once a tool used by humans. homo erectusour direct ancestors, and new dating reveals they are the earliest evidence of human habitation on the European continent.
“It was previously thought that our ancestors could not have survived in colder northern latitudes without the use of fire or complex stone tool technology,” said archaeologist Andy Herries of Australia’s La Trobe University. says.
“But here we have evidence homo erectus They lived further north than previously recorded during this early period. ”
The history of human evolution and dispersal around the world is a difficult puzzle to put together. But in recent years, evidence has begun to emerge that it is not a simple, linear story that began in a single cradle in one part of the world.And some recent evidence suggests that homo sapiens They may have been moving across Europe much faster than we previously thought.
That means human history is far more complex than we previously thought, and there are some serious holes in our understanding of it.
Our model is mainly based on stone tools. Along with some scanty bone traces and some other robust remains – They are one of the few traces that can survive the ages. However, the stone artifacts are not stamped with manufacturing dates, leaving researchers to rely on surrounding clues to determine their age and place in history.
The Korolevo ruins are spectacular ruins. The layers reach depths of 14 meters (46 feet) and were deposited over many years, from which thousands of artifacts dating back thousands of years have been unearthed. At least seven separate eras of human occupation are known at this site, spanning at least nine Paleolithic cultures up to approximately 30,000 years ago.
However, there are no biological remains at the site, only stones, ruling out the usual typical method of radiocarbon dating nearby organic matter. For decades after this tool was discovered, researchers could only guess at their age.
Fortunately, recent advances have finally made it possible to accurately date buried rocks. This was noticed by a team led by archaeologist Roman Galba of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
“To answer the questions that archeology and anthropology pose, we need to use both nuclear and geophysical methods,” Garba says.
The technique they used is called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating, which takes advantage of the fact that material exposed on the earth’s surface is exposed to cosmic rays. By comparing the decay of a particular atomic nucleus, we can measure the amount of time that has passed since the object last saw the sky.
“At the Korolevo site, we specifically measured the concentrations of the cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, which have different half-lives,” explains Galba.
“These nuclides accumulate in quartz grains when the rock is on the surface due to the influence of cosmic rays from space, but when buried underground they begin to decay. It depends on how long it was buried.” This allows us to calculate its age since burial. ”
The research team also used unique mathematics-based modeling to determine the age of the sediment layers. This is the first time this method has been used for archaeological dating. The oldest date they obtained using this method was 1.42 million years for the oldest tools in the assemblage.
By dating the artifacts, researchers were able to fill in some of the gaps in the history of human migration. According to their research, homo erectus It migrated through Asia 1.8 million years ago and was present in Europe by 1.4 million years ago.the oldest known homo erectus The fossil, which is 2 million years old, was found in fragments in a cave in South Africa and then painstakingly pieced together.
Of course, there’s still much we don’t know, but researchers say this is a step in the right direction.
“We don’t yet know whether this was part of a larger European occupation that has yet to be discovered at this point,” Herries said.
This study Nature.
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