According to scientists, 1.4 million years ago, the path of people to Europe ran through Transcarpathia.
The village of Korolevo in Transcarpathia was called the very first confirmed place of residence of people, presumably upright people, on the territory of Europe. Scientists came to this conclusion when they discovered stone tools about 1.4 million years old in royal sediments. The findings indicate that the settlement of Europe by humans may have occurred from east to west from the Caucasus through the Carpathians.
This was reported by Nauka.ua with reference to a study by scientists published in the journal Nature.
What were scientists looking for in the Queen?
Representatives of the genus Homo, who lived before the appearance of our species, arrived in Eurasia about 2 million years ago. And the oldest reliable evidence of human arrival in Europe concerns several monuments in the southwestern regions — these are human remains, stone tools and other artifacts from Spain and France aged 1.2-1.1 million years.
It is not known for certain how these people reached the west of Europe due to the lack of precisely dated traces of human existence. However, to the southeast of Europe, in the Caucasus, evidence of the existence of people 1.8 million years ago has survived to this day. This led scientists to believe that it was from there that the westward movement of people to Europe took place. Since Korolevo in Transcarpathia is known for a large number of artifacts from those ancient times and is located in the middle between the oldest evidence of human existence in Europe and the Caucasus, scientists decided to carefully study and date its finds. And so they discovered that Transcarpathia could be a bridge through which people got to Europe.
How were the royal finds studied?
The researchers set out to date the stone tools found in the lowest layer of sediments associated with humans at the site of the royal quarry. To do this, they used two dating methods based on measuring the content of cosmogenic nuclides in sediments.
Stone tools from Korolev, which were studied by scientists. Roman Garba et al. / Nature, 2024
The results indicated that the sediments in which human artifacts were found are about 1.4 million years old. This makes Korolevo the oldest confirmed human habitation in Europe known. The skeletal remains of the inhabitants of that time have not been preserved in Korolev to determine to which species they belonged, but judging by time, scientists assume that they were representatives of Homo erectus (Homo erectus).
What do the findings mean?
The authors of the study believe that Korolevo is both a spatial and temporal bridge connecting the habitats of primitive people in the Caucasus and in southwestern Europe. The fact that it was through the territory of Korolev, although not necessarily exclusively through it, that the path of people to Europe passed, is also indicated by the similarities between his stone tools and tools from locations in the Caucasus. However, the limited number of tools from monuments in southwestern Europe does not allow for a detailed comparison of royal artifacts with them.
The territory of Korolev as a bridge to Europe is also evidenced by the results of climate modeling at that time. Thus, about 1.4 million years ago, the territory of Transcarpathia experienced a warm interglacial period, which could contribute to the settlement of people.
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