A long time ago, in what is now western Ukraine, a starving human wanted to eat a piece of carrion or crack a bone and extract the nutritious marrow.
He picked up a stone and began to hit it until he got a rough edge with which to get the desired food from him.
This was cutting-edge technology in Paleolithic times.
The stone was buried and forgotten until a group of kids under the orders of an archaeologist named VN Gladilin unearthed it in the 1980s. Immediately, they knew that they were the most primitive human utensils they had ever seen, but they could not establish their exact age.
One of those boys was called Vitaly Usik and today he is a 63-year-old veteran archaeologist who fled his native Ukraine when the war broke out.
After a four-year investigation, two of them in the middle of war, a revolutionary technology that uses star explosions as a geological chronometer has made it possible to demonstrate that the tools were carved 1.4 million years ago.
They are the oldest in Europe and their author was probably one of the first human beings to colonize the continent.
More information
Why we are the only human species on the planet
The discovery clarifies how our ancestors,
Homo erectus
, left Africa and discovered Europe.
The study, which is published today in the journal
Nature
,
a reference for the best world science, constitutes the triumph of a lifetime for the punished emigrated Ukrainian scientists.
Like Usik, who currently works at the Institute of Archeology in Brno (Czech Republic), or her colleague Natasha Gerasimenko, who continues to teach at the Taras Shevchenko National University in kyiv, defying the bombings.
Researchers from four other European countries also sign the work.
“For a long time, the study of human evolution on our continent has been focused on France or Spain, while hardly anything was known about Eastern and Central Europe,” explains Roman Garba, archaeologist and researcher at the Institute of Physics of the Republic. Checa and co-author of the work.
“Our discovery shows that the first humans arrived in Europe from the southeast and probably entered following the Danube channel,” he highlights.
The Korolevo site has been saved from the terror and destruction of the war in Ukraine thanks to its location.
“It is a few kilometers from the border with Romania and Hungary, two NATO countries;
and not a single bomb has fallen since the war began,” details Garba.
In the summer of 2023, the researcher traveled to Korolevo, located next to some quarries that are still in operation, to preserve the site and contemplate the ground levels where the tools appeared in the 1980s.
Cosmic ray dating
Supernovae are explosions of dying stars.
These cataclysms produce cosmic rays that travel throughout the universe at the speed of light.
When they reach Earth, they impact minerals and generate radioactive compounds.
Using a particle accelerator, you can establish the amount of cosmic rays a sample has received and determine its age.
This cosmogenic nuclide dating, carried out at the Helmholtz Center accelerator in Dresden-Rosendorf (Germany), gives an age of 1.4 million years, with a margin of error of 100,000 years up or down.
Archaeologist Roman Garba at the Korolevo site (Ukraine) in summer 2023.RG
At that time Europe was able to experience a period of prosperity.
Huge glaciers the size of entire countries retreated to the north, leaving territory free for the arrival of mammoths, hippos, saber-toothed tigers, giant hyenas and other megafauna.
Probably hidden, terrified and hungry, the first humans followed in the footsteps of the beasts to take advantage of the carrion they left in their wake.
They didn't know how to make fire, they had a much smaller brain than ours, but they already walked upright;
and they managed to leave Africa about two million years ago until reaching confines as far away as the island of Java about 500,000 years later.
The erectus are the human species that has survived the longest on this planet.
It has always been considered an Asian species because most of its remains appeared on this continent.
Those from Africa are assigned to their ancestor,
Homo habilis
, named for their ability to make crude stone tools not unlike those found at Korolevo.
His steps through Europe are much more uncertain.
In August 2005, a spectacular, primitive, frowning skull was painstakingly unearthed in Dmanisi, Georgia.
It showed that erectus were in this area 1.8 million years ago.
The following fossil traces are mysteriously at the other end of the continent: in the mythical Sima del Elefante in the Atapuerca mountain range (Burgos), and are from 1.2 million years ago.
The Korolevo site now fills the temporal and geographical gap between those two points.
“It is a strategic place from the Paleolithic point of view,” explains Ukrainian archaeologist Usik, whose doctoral thesis was based on his work at this site.
“It is on a high point from where humans could see the movement of the animals.
There is a rich reserve of volcanic stone with which to make tools and abundant water.
Thanks to this new dating technique we have been able to go from saying that the tools were relatively old to fixing the date on which the first humans arrived in this place and in Europe in general,” he highlights.
The tools are now stored in the basements of the National Archaeological Museum in kyiv along with the rest of the collection to protect them from bombing.
Those responsible for the investigation have asked the European Union for million-dollar aid to excavate again in Korolevo and find more lithic remains.
The terrain is too acidic to preserve human fossils, Garba believes.
Image of the work at the Korolevo site taken in 1984.Archaeological Institute of the NAS
All the expectation now moves to the Atapuerca site, where in the summer of 2022 a face fragment up to 1.4 million years old was found, which would make it the oldest human fossil in Europe, although it has not yet been dated. precision.
The rest has been named Pink, a possible tribute in English to one of its discoverers, Rosa (Pink) Huguet.
María Martinón-Torres, director of the National Center for Human Evolution, highlights that the Korolevo study is “robust and important, because it joins the list of the few sites in Europe that can document the presence of humans before one million years ago. solidity".
And she adds: “Atapuerca remains the only one that, in addition to [lithic] industry, also provides human remains that can help us determine who was the protagonist of these first incursions.
The authors suggest that due to chronology it could belong to
Homo erectus
, but we will have to wait for Pink's study to be able to solve the mystery."
Huguet, co-responsible for the excavations at Sima del Elefante, explains: “We hope that Pink's work and its entire context will be published after the summer at the latest.”
The discovery of Korolevo, he adds, “is magnificent news,” and highlights that it is the northernmost site in which human traces have been found.
Atapuerca and Dmanisi are much further south and fit better as climatic refuges in times of glaciation.
This supports the theory that humans did not arrive in Europe at once, but in successive pulses, taking advantage of the periods between ice ages, of about 40,000 years.
When the cold returned they died out or fled south again.
Our own species,
Homo sapiens
, is thought to have emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago, probably from
Homo erectus
.
Our species left Africa several times, probably taking advantage of warm periods.
All of the current inhabitants of the planet descend from one of those pulses that left the continent about 70,000 years ago.
The remains of erectus become so abundant and different that possibly “we have to think more carefully” and name new species to differentiate some populations from others, says Juan Luis Arsuaga, co-director of Atapuerca.
What he has no doubt about is the path through Europe marked by the Ukrainian discovery: “Surely the route they followed was that way.”
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