The analysis of some old prehistoric artefacts found in Ukraine in 1974 allowed scientists to make a rather interesting discovery. Until now, most of the stone tools that have been found in Europe belonged to modern human species.
The main finds were in fact the result of the work of Homo sapiens from Neanderthal man with some small exceptions linked to extraordinary discoveries in Spain and England, dating back to an era before the arrival of the ice ages. The stone tools found however a Korolev, in western Ukraine, they tell an even older story.
They follow a tradition similar to the Olduvaian one, the most primitive style of manufacturing objects ever produced by our ancestors. Similar tools have been found in the oldest occupation sites of Africa and Asia, but have rarely ever been found in Europe, partly because this continent was conquered by the first species of the genus Homo much later than the rest of Eurasia. .. or at least that’s what we thought until now.
From what emerged in the new study, which led to the publication of an article in Nature, through a new dating method, paleo anthropologists were able to indicate to 1.4 million years ago the period of creation of these instruments, making them in fact the oldest ever found on our continent.
Scientists are still not very clear who produced them, although there is no doubt that they do not belong to our species or other modern human forms. In fact, the latter only appeared in the last half million years and followed completely different styles of creating objects. These objects, therefore, belonged to a much older species.
A possible candidate among those who could have created these artifacts is Standing man, the first human species that managed to leave Africa and expand its territory, exploring Asia, before mysteriously vanishing. As important as this discovery turns out to be, traces of this species have never been found so far north.
“If our hypothesis were confirmed, Korolevo would become the northernmost outpost of Homo erectus found so far, testimony to the intrepidity of this ancestor”the study co-author said John Jansen senior researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. “It is possible that sites belonging to the same species are further north, but are now deeply buried by glaciers.”
The authors of the study also clarify that artefacts completely comparable to those found in Korolevo have been found in Ethiopia, dating back to the same historical period.
This discovery offers the opportunity to change the history of European paleoanthropology forever, but it also allows us to understand how the first human societies were formed, which over time formed that mosaic of communities in perpetual conflict, due to the pressures environmental but also thanks to technological progress.