Human evolution: migrations of Homo erectus (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 10, 2024, 16:44 (47 days ago) @ David Turell

Into Europe at 1.4 million years ago:

https://www.sciencealert.com/archaeologists-just-uncovered-the-oldest-evidence-of-human...

"Stone tools found buried deep in the sediment of the Korolevo quarry in Ukraine are rewriting the history of human migration.

The seemingly unassuming chunks of rock are tools once used by Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of ours, and new dating reveals they represent the earliest evidence of hominid habitation on the European continent.

"'Previously it was thought that our earliest ancestors could not survive in colder, more northerly latitudes without the use of fire or complex stone tool technology," says archaeologist Andy Herries of La Trobe University in Australia.

"'Yet here we have evidence of Homo erectus living further north than ever previously documented at this early time period."

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"Our models are largely based on stone tools, since they – along with some scanty bone traces and a few other robust artifacts – are among the few traces capabile of surviving through the eons. Yet stone artifacts don't come stamped with a production date, leaving researchers to rely on surrounding clues to determine their age and place in history.

***

"'At the Korolevo site, we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminum-26, which have different half-lives," Garba explains.

"'These nuclides accumulate in the quartz grains when the rock is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from space, but they begin to decay when they become buried in the ground. The ratio of the two varies according to how long the clasts were buried beneath the ground surface. This allows us to calculate their age since burial."

"The team also used their own mathematical-based modeling to determine the age of the sediment layers, the first time this method has been used for archaeological dating. The earliest age they obtained using this method was 1.42 million years, for the oldest tools in the assemblage.

"The dating of the artifacts has allowed the researchers to fill in some of the gaps in the history of human migration. Their research shows that Homo erectus was in Europe by 1.4 million years ago, having migrated through Asia 1.8 million years ago. The oldest known Homo erectus fossil dates to 2 million years ago, found in fragments in a cave in South Africa and painstakingly pieced together."

Comment: just recently we noted how humans liked to migrate, in this case north out of Africa.