New evidence suggests early human ancestors were present in Europe 200,000 years earlier than previously thought
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CSU paleoanthropologist Michael Pante is available for interviews.
Newly published research, featuring the work of Colorado State University paleoanthropologist Michael Pante, has uncovered groundbreaking evidence suggesting that early human ancestors were present in Europe much earlier than previously believed.
The study, led by co-principal investigators Sabrina Curran, an associate professor at Ohio University; Alexandru Petculescu from the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology at the Romanian Academy; Claire E. Terhune, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas; and Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institute, hinges on the identification of multiple bones that appear to have been cut marked by early hominins using stone tools at the site of Grăunceanu, Romania.
Pushing back the timeline
Dating to approximately 1.95 million years ago, the marks represent some of the earliest evidence of tool use and meat processing in Eurasia.
Published in Nature Communications, the findings challenge previous assumptions about the timeline of hominin migration across Eurasia. Earlier evidence pointed to the presence of early humans in Dmanisi, Georgia, around 1.8 million years ago. However, the Grăunceanu discovery pushes that back, suggesting hominins could have arrived in Eurasia as early as 2 million years ago.
This new discovery adds to a growing body of work stemming from decades of archaeological research in Romania, where significant fossil findings were made in the 1960s and 1980s. Originally curated at the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology and the Museum of Oltenia, the bones had been largely overlooked until recent re-examinations by Curran and her team.
“We didn’t initially expect to find much,” Curran said in an Ohio University press release. “But during a routine check of the collections we found several cut marked bones.”
The bone collector
To learn more about what the cut marks could indicate, Curran sent impressions of the marks to Pante. Last year, Pante and Pobiner collaborated on a groundbreaking study that identified the oldest decisive evidence of humans’ close evolutionary relatives butchering and likely eating one another.
That was the first application of the 3D quantitative method — developed and published by Pante in 2017 — to a fossil specimen. A 3D non-contact profilometer was used to create extremely precise scans of impressions of the cut marks. Pante then compared the shape of the marks to a database of 898 individual tooth, butchery and animal trample marks created through controlled experiments. The method has set a new standard for cut mark identification on bones that is more objective and reliable than the qualitative approaches used in the past.
Pante said he’s proud that this technique has led to a number of collaborations with researchers from outside institutions and contributed to the Anthropology and Geography Department’s standing among the top 5 programs in the country for R&D expenditures in their discipline.
“It’s helped make our department a location where researchers come because most other universities just don’t have access to the technology that we have here,” he said.
They also don’t have the large data set of marks that Pante and his graduate students have painstakingly put together over the years.
Pante used this same method to examine the cut marks on the bones from Grăunceanu. Going in without any background information on the cut marks or where they came from, he used the 3D quantitative method to determine that the distinct marks found on the different mammal bones suggested deliberate butchering activities.
“It’s very difficult to get papers like this published without any additional evidence of human behavior at a site,” Pante said. “So, the fact that there are no stone tools or remains of ancestors, but we can still establish their presence based on scratches on a bone surface is pretty amazing.”
The earliest believed cut marked bone is from a site in Ethiopia, but there were also no stone tools found there. That finding, which precedes other sites by nearly 1 million years, is now being called into question.
“Between the time that study was published 15 years ago to today, there’s been a huge improvement to the standards that we apply to these types of questions,” Pante said. “Especially in situations like this where you really have to show through an abundance of evidence that these are actually cut marks and not just some other type of scrape on the bone.”
A highly adaptable species
This discovery in Romania is especially notable because it predates the Dmanisi site in Georgia — previously considered the earliest evidence of hominin activity outside of Africa — by roughly 200,000 years. This new finding places Romania as a crucial location for understanding the spread and behaviors of early human ancestors.
The findings are supported by biostratigraphic data and high-resolution U-Pb dating techniques, which have established the site’s age with remarkable precision. In addition, the team used isotope analysis to reconstruct the environments that these hominins would have experienced in this area at the time. Those results indicate that the region would have experienced seasonal fluctuations in temperature, much like today, but perhaps with increased levels of rainfall.
This points to a species that was likely migrating seasonally, Pante noted. It was one that was able to live in this type of environment, possibly with the ability to control fire or fashion a type of clothing to protect themselves from the elements.
“It’s just a hypothesis, but it’s probable that they had technologies that we are not aware of because they’re not preservable in the archaeological record,” he said. “But it really speaks to the adaptability of our ancestors, which is an important characteristic that all humans share today.”