Until this year, the earliest date recorded for the presence of humans in Europe came from the Sierra de Atapuerca in the Province of Burgos, northern Spain. The Sima del Elefante cave yielded a fossil mandible of a human dubbed Homo antecessor from which an age between 1.2 to 1.1 Ma was estimated from a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and stratigraphy. Stone tools from the Vallonet Cave in southern France are around the same age. There is a time gap of about 200 ka before the next sign of human ventures into Europe, probably coinciding with an extreme ice age. They reappear in the form of stone tools and even footprints that they left between 1.0 to 0.78 Ma in ancient river sediments beneath the crumbling sea cliffs of Happisburgh in Norfolk, England. Although no human fossils were preserved, they too have been assigned to H. antecessor.
In 1974 Soviet archaeologists discovered a site bearing stone tools by the River Tisza at Korolevo in the Carpathian Mountains close to the borders between Ukraine, Romania and Hungary. Korolevo lies at the northeastern edge of the Pannonian Basin that dominates modern Hungary. Whoever left the tools was on the westward route to a huge, fertile area whose game might support them and their descendants. The route along the Tisza leads to the River Danube and then to its headwaters far to the west. Going eastwards leads to the plains north of the Black Sea and eventually via Georgia to the Levant. On that route lies Dmanisi in Georgia, famous for the site where remains of the first hominins (H. erectus, dated at ~1.8 Ma) to leave Africa were found (see: Consider Homo erectus for what early humans achived). The tools from Korolevo are primitive, but have remained undated since 1974. 50 years on, Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences with colleagues from Czechia, Ukraine, Germany, Australia, South Africa and Denmark have finally resolved their antiquity (Garba, R. and 12 others 2024. East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago. Nature v. 627, p. 805–810; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3). Without fossils it is not possible to decide if the tool makers were H. erectus or H. antecessor.
The method used to date the site is based on radioactive 10Be and 26Al formed from oxygen and silicon in quartz grains by cosmic ray bombardment while the grains are at the surface. Since the half life of 26Al (0.7 Ma) is less than that of 10Be (1.4 Ma), after burial the 26Al/10Be ratio decreases and is a guide to the age of the sediment layer that contains the quartz grains. In this case the ag is quite precise (1.42 ± 0.28 Ma). The decreasing age of H. erectus or H. antecessor sites from the 1.8 Ma of Dmanisi in Georgia in the east, through 1.4 Ma (Korolevo) to 1.2 in Spain and France could mark the slow westward migration of the earliest Europeans. It is tempting to suggest possible routes as Garba et al. have. But such sparse and widely separated sites can yield very little certainty. Indeed, it is equally likely that each known site marks the destination of separate migrations at different times that ended in population collapse. The authors make an interesting point regarding the Korolevo population. They were there at a time when three successive interglacials were significantly warmer than the majority during the Early Pleistocene. Also glacial cycles then had ~41 ka time spans before the transition to 100 ka about 1 Ma ago. Unfortunately, no information about the ecosystem that the migrants exploited is available
See also: Prostak, S. 2024. 1.4-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Found in Ukraine Document Earliest Hominin Occupation of Europe. Sci News, 7 March 2024. (includes map showing possible routes of early human dispersal)
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