The tools he once used were seemingly humble pieces of stone Homo erectusour direct ancestor, and new dating shows that they are the earliest evidence of hominid settlement on the European continent.

“It was thought that our earliest ancestors could not have survived in colder northern latitudes without the use of fire or advanced stone tools,” says archaeologist Andy Harris of La Trobe University in Australia.

“But we have the evidence Homo erectus “He lived farther north than ever before documented in this early period.”

The history of human evolution and global distribution is a complex puzzle that is difficult to piece together. But in recent years, evidence has begun to emerge that this is not a simple, linear narrative unfolding in a single cradle somewhere in the world. Several recent pieces of evidence suggest that: homo sapiens It could cross into Europe much sooner than we previously thought.

All this means that human history appears to be much more complex than we thought, and that there are serious gaps in our understanding of it. Our models are based mostly on stone tools because these – along with some sparse bone traces and a few other durable artifacts – are among the few traces that have survived through the ages. But because the stone artifacts have not been dated, researchers are forced to rely on clues from the environment to determine their age and place in history.

The archaeological site of Korolevo is impressive. It reaches a depth of 14 meters (46 ft) in layers accumulated over time, from which thousands of artifacts dating back thousands of years have been excavated. At least seven different periods of hominid occupation in at least nine Paleolithic cultures were known in the region until approximately 30,000 years ago.

But there are no biological remains at the site, only stone, precluding the usual method of radiocarbon dating any nearby organic material. In the decades since the vehicles were discovered, researchers have only been able to estimate their age. Fortunately, recent advances have finally made it possible to accurately date buried stones, and a team led by archaeologist Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences has set out to do so.

“We need to use both nuclear physics and geophysical techniques to answer the questions posed by archeology and anthropology,” says Garba.

The technique they use is called cosmogenic nuclide burial dating, which exploits the fact that material exposed at the surface is bombarded by cosmic rays. By comparing the decays of specific atomic nuclei, it is possible to measure the time since the object was last seen in the sky.

“At the Korolevo test site, we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, which have different half-lives,” explains Garba.

“These nuclides accumulate within the quartz grains when the rock is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from space, but begin to decay once buried in the ground. The ratio of the two varies depending on how long the debris remains buried. This allows us to calculate their age from the moment they were buried.”

The team also used specialized mathematical modeling to determine the age of sediment layers, a method used for the first time in archaeological dating. The oldest age they obtained using this method was 1.42 million years for the oldest tools in the assemblage.

Dating the artifacts allowed researchers to fill in some of the gaps in the history of human migration. Their research shows that Homo erectus It was in Europe 1.4 million years ago and migrated from Asia 1.8 million years ago. oldest known fossil Homo erectus Dating back to 2 million years ago, it was found in pieces in a cave in South Africa and was carefully put together. Frankly, there’s still a lot we don’t know, but researchers say this is a step in the right direction.

“Whether this was part of a larger, yet undetected invasion of Europe at the time remains to be seen,” says Harris.