Rewriting History: New Discovery Reveals Hominins Left Africa 200,000 Years Earlier Than We Thought

New research indicates that hominins migrated into Eurasia approximately 200,000 years earlier than previously believed, predating the Dmanisi site in Georgia.

Anthropologists continue to debate when early hominins—ancestors closely related to modern humans—first migrated out of Africa and began their gradual spread across the globe. While the widely accepted view has been that hominins reached Eurasia at least 1.8 million years ago, some fragmentary evidence has suggested an even earlier presence. Now, new findings from an international team of researchers push that timeline back to nearly 2 million years ago.

This conclusion is based on multiple fossil bones bearing cut marks, discovered at the Grăunceanu site in Romania. Located in the Olteț River Valley, Grăunceanu is one of several fossil-rich sites originally excavated in the 1960s. Because no hominin remains have been found there, researchers have relied on indirect evidence of their presence, such as stone tools and marks left by tool use on animal bones.

More than 5,000 bones from Grăunceanu and surrounding sites were meticulously examined for evidence of cut marks from stone tools used to remove the flesh from animals. Of that total, the team identified at least 20 bones they are confident show signs of cut marks. Biostratagraphic data and high-precision uranium-lead dating techniques were used to estimate the age of the bones, which put their minimum age at 1.95 million years ago.

Publication and Research Team

The findings were published in Nature Communications. The international team of more than a dozen researchers was led by Sabrina Curran, an associate professor of anthropology at Ohio University; Claire Terhune, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas; and Alexandru Petculescu, of the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology in Bucharest.

Terhune noted that the team had to overcome several challenges, including the absence of hominin bones and stone tools at the site. They also had to contend with the fact that the bones were excavated more than 50 years ago, making the relationship of the bones to one another and the exact reasons for their deposition hard to determine.

The fossils are currently curated in the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology and the Museum of Oltenia. Though researchers had worked with the bones intermittently since their discovery, it was not until the last decade or so that they thought to reexamine them and conduct careful inspections of the surface of each bone.

Reassessing the Oldest Hominin Presence

“We didn’t initially expect to find much,” Curran said. “But during a routine check of the collections we found several cut-marked bones. This led to further investigation in collaboration with Dr. Briana Pobiner of the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Michael Pante of Colorado State University, and the discovery of other distinct marks across different bones, suggesting deliberate butchering activities.”

Prior to this discovery, the site of Dmanisi in the country of Georgia was thought to contain the oldest evidence of hominin activity outside of Africa, dated to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Confirming the age of the marks establishes both the presence of hominins in Eurasia 200,000 years earlier than previously thought as well as tool use by them, providing some of the earliest evidence of hominin activity in this area

Reconstructing the Hominin Environment

The team combined this work with isotopic analyses led by Virgil Drăguşin from the “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology that helped to reconstruct the environment these hominins would have been living in at the time. This work suggests this region would have experienced seasonal fluctuations in temperature, much like today, but that there likely would have been higher levels of rainfall. This would likely have been different from the environments these hominins were originally adapted to in Africa. Analysis of the animal fossils from the site also shows they would have encountered a range of new fauna, including wooly rhinos, saber tooth cats, pangolins, and mammoths.

“The field of paleoanthropology can be contentious,” Terhune noted. “People get really fired up about human ancestors, and one ongoing debate has been related to the earliest evidence of tool use. Because of this, we have been extremely meticulous in documenting the presence of these cut marks because we knew if we handed another paleontologist these bones, they’d say, ‘Oh, yeah these are cut marks.’ But if we told them they’re from Romania two million years ago, they’re going to say, ‘No, that can’t be right’.”

But the team is confident they got the facts right, and that the discovery is an important step forward.

“The Grăunceanu site represents a pivotal moment in our understanding of human prehistory,” Curran added. “It demonstrates that early hominins had already begun to explore and inhabit diverse environments across Eurasia, showing an adaptability that would later play a crucial role in their survival and spread.”

“The history of human evolution is far more complex and intricate than we could have imagined,” she added, “and we are just beginning to uncover the many chapters of that story.”

Reference: “Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago” by Sabrina C. Curran, Virgil Drăgușin, Briana Pobiner, Michael Pante, John Hellstrom, Jon Woodhead, Roman Croitor, Adrian Doboș, Samantha E. Gogol, Vasile Ersek, Trevor L. Keevil, Alexandru Petculescu, Aurelian Popescu, Chris Robinson, Lars Werdelin and Claire E. Terhune, 20 January 2025, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9

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