New Study Reveals Europeans Reached Ukraine 1.4 Million Years Ago

March 10, 2024

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By John Jansen,The Conversation

During Earth's warmer periods, known as interglacials, colossal glaciers retracted, revealing untouched landscapes. These novel landscapes offered areas for early humans to exploit and explore, such as Europe was 1.4 million years ago: a human-free Terra nullius.

Long before its role as the hub of global colonialism, Europe was colonized by human migrants from the east.

A recent study led by researchers from the Czech Academy of Sciences and Aarhus University, published in Nature, details the earliest human presence in Europe. This historic site is located on the Tysa River in the western part of Ukraine and is referred to as Korolevo.

We investigated an array of stone tools left by their creators on a river bed. These 'core-and-flake' tools, made in Oldowan, the earliest known style of tool-making, are similar to tools found in Europe's oldest known occupied sites, as well as the Levant and Asia. Mary Leakey, a paleoanthropologist, initially classified this style of tool-making in east Africa.

Buried by river sediment and subsequently by wind-blown dust, the tools at Korolevo were eventually uncovered in a stone quarry. V. N. Gladilin, a Ukrainian archaeologist, initially discovered evidence of prehistoric humans at this site in 1974.

Dating the tools initially proved to be a challenge. Measurements of residual magnetism in overlaying sediments suggested that the earliest tools predate the Matuyama-Brunhes reversal, the Earth's most recent magnetic field reversal that took place 0.8 million years ago. Such timing exceeds the range of conventional dating methods, such as radiocarbon and luminescence dating.

To tackle this issue, we employed a novel dating method that uses cosmogenic nuclides and can stretch back 5 million years, a critical period for human evolution. This method has already been successful at dating other crucial sites, like the Australopithecus at Sterkfontein in South Africa, and the Zhoukoudian Homo erectus, also known as 'Peking Man.'

This method works as follows: exploding stars or supernovae, release cosmic rays that arrive at Earth's upper atmosphere and create secondary cosmic rays. These rays interact with minerals in rocks and soils to produce radioactive nuclides in trace but quantifiable amounts.

We observed two such nuclides, namely beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, to calculate the burial age. We obtained a date by examining the ratio of these two nuclides, which changes during burial due to their different radioactive decay half-lives: 1.4-million-years for beryllium-10 and 0.7-million-years for aluminum-26.

Using this technique on the sediment layer that contains the stone tools at Korolevo allowed us to calculate a burial age of 1.3 to 1.5 million years, making Korolevo the oldest certified human occupation in Europe.

Who were the settlers at Korolevo?

Lack of fossils at Korolevo means we cannot definitively identify these early settlers. However, given the antiquity and primitiveness of these tools, their creators were undescoresumably not modern humans (Homo sapiens) or Neanderthals. It's highly plausible that these toolmakers were a version of Homo erectus, early human ancestors who emerged around 2 million years ago and spread throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe.

On their migration from Africa to Eurasia, early humans moved through the Levant region, leaving signs of habitation dating back 2.5 million years in Zarqa Valley. Further north, several Homo erectus fossils have been found in the Caucasus mountains at Dmanisi, dating to 1.8 million years ago.

Upon reaching Eurasia, humans migrated eastwards remarkably fast, reaching as far as the island of Java, Southeast Asia, around the same time we have evidence of them in Western Ukraine. The timing of their westward migration into Europe remains a mystery, but we see Korolevo as a link between migration from the Caucasus 1.8 million years ago and settlements in southwestern Europe 1.2 to 1.1 million years ago at Atapuerca and Vallonnet. A prevailing theory suggests that humans entered Europe from the east via the Danube Valley and Pannonian Plain.

What they found was very different to the present day. 1.4 million years ago, Europe was home to megafauna such as the mammoth, hippopotamus, giant species of hyena, cheetah, beaver, saber-toothed cat, scimitar-toothed cat, and the European jaguar—among others that have long since disappeared from the continent.

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 behavior back then, just as it is today.

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.

Journal information: Nature

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