Europe’s first people

Although anthropologists have long known that some groups of people began leaving Africa about 60,000 years ago, most of them were nomadic and did not stay in one particular area for long. And about 40,000 years ago, a supervolcano in southern Italy wiped out most of the humans and Neanderthals in Europe. These events made anthropologists think When the ancestors of today’s Europeans decided to come and settle.

An international team of researchers believes they have found the first permanent inhabitants of Europe among a collection of skeletons from the Buran-Kai III site on the Crimean Peninsula. Buran Kaya III, a cave site discovered in 1990, has rich deposits of human activity from the Middle Paleolithic to the Middle Ages (at least 50,000 years old). But layers dating to 38,000 to 34,000 years ago are of great interest to archaeologists because they contain objects such as stone tools and carved bones that resemble artifacts from the Gravettian culture. This culture spread to Europe about 33,000 years ago. Buran Kaya may be the earliest evidence of permanent settlement in Europe and may have given rise to the Gravettian culture.

To investigate the idea that the Buran-Kai people were ancestors of the Gravettian masters, a research team led by paleogenomics experts Eva-Marie Heigl and Thierry Grange of France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) sequenced the genomes of two male skeletons. Fossils found at Buran-Kai were carbon dated to approximately 35,800-37,500 years ago.

After sequencing the genomes of the two men and comparing them with the genomes of other people living in Europe at the time, the researchers concluded that the men were more similar to the genomes of young Europeans than older ones. This finding puts the Buran Kai people in line with the wave of population that came to Europe after the supervolcano eruption of the Phlegrean Fields in southern Italy.

It is particularly notable that the Buran Kai people were found with Gravettian-style stone tools, generally found 7,000 years later and about 3,000 kilometers away from the site. Researchers hypothesize that after the climate warmed about 38,000-35,000 years ago, people left Crimea and other southern refuges and settled in Eastern and Central Europe, taking their culture with them.

Our study adds a key piece to the puzzle of how anatomically modern humans settled Europe.
– says Eva-Maria Haigl, adding that the genetic results confirm the hypothesis of Ukrainian archaeologists, namely that “people from Buran-Kai III are the ancestors of Western Europeans who created the Gravettian culture.”

But not everything is that simple. There is a possibility that things may not be exactly like this. There are also clues that the Buran-Kai people came to Crimea from Europe, waited there for a while after the volcano eruption, and then resettled in the abandoned area. Although the above link has not been confirmed, the genomic results obtained by Haigl and his team indicate that the Phlegrean explosion did not lead to the complete extinction of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe.