The oldest human traces of Europe were found in western Ukraine

In the 1980s, a group of children on assignment from an archaeologist V.N. Gladilin found a stone with a rough tip, which hominids used to eat pieces of meat or break bones and extract bone marrow as a source of nutrition. One of the children, Vitaly Usik, now a 63-year-old archaeologist, has been involved in the investigation over the past four years, two of which were during the war in Ukraine.

Revolutionary technology using stellar explosions as a geological timekeeper has demonstrated that the tools were carved 1.4 million years ago. Thus, they are the oldest traces of human presence in Europe, the author of which was one of the first people to colonize the continent.

This discovery sheds light on how our ancestors, Homo erectus, left Africa and discovered Europe. Roman Garba, an archaeologist and co-author of the study, emphasized that “the first people arrived in Europe from the southeast and probably entered along the Danube.”

The discovery site, Korolevo, in western Ukraine, “is only a few kilometers from the border with Romania and Hungary, two NATO countries, and not a single bomb has fallen there since the beginning of the war,” Roman Garba explained. Over the summer, the researcher traveled to Korolevo to preserve the site and study the soil levels where tools appeared in the 1980s.