Roman Garba published the results, some of which come from RADIATE Transnational Access projects, in Nature. Below you can find the press release of the Czech Academy of Sciences:
The oldest known human occupation of Europe lies near the town of Korolevo in western Ukraine. New findings by an international team led by Roman Garba from the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences have confirmed that stone tools at Korolevo date to 1.4 million years ago, the oldest known in Europe. Until now, the earliest inhabited location was thought to be from Atapuerca in Spain some 200 to 300,000 years later. The results, now published in Nature, also show that early hominins took advantage of warm interglacial periods to colonise Europe from the east. A recent advance in mathematical modelling combined with applied nuclear physics has enabled the precise dating of the Korolevo’s earliest occupation. The four-year long research project involved scientists from five countries and more than ten research institutions from around the world.
The new study changes the view of the dispersal routes of the “first Europeans”, filling in the missing piece of the mosaic of what we know about the history of the first peopling of Europe. The site of Korolevo in present-day Zakarpattia Oblast (Transcarpathia), near Ukraine’s borders with Romania and Hungary, is also the northernmost known occurrence of Homo erectus in the world. The Korolevo site contains only stone tools, but due to their determined age, it is assumed that H. erectus produced them and occupied Europe at this time.
“Our earliest ancestor, H. erectus, was the first of the hominins to leave Africa some two million years ago and head for the Middle East, east Asia, and Europe. The radiometric dating of the first human presence at the Korolevo site not only fills in a large spatial gap between the Dmanisi site in Georgia and Atapuerca in Spain, but also confirms the hypothesis that the first pulse of hominin dispersal into Europe came from the east,” the lead author of the study, Roman Garba from the Nuclear Physics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Institute of Archaeology of the CAS in Prague, sums up the research findings. “Based on a climate model and field pollen data, we have identified three possible interglacial periods when the first hominins may have reached Korolevo following the Danube corridor,” Garba adds.
The prehistoric archive of Europe
The archaeological site of Korolevo is significant for Europe as a whole. “We know that the layer of accumulated loess and palaeosols here reaches a depth of up to 14 metres and contains thousands of stone tools. Korolevo was an important source of raw material for their production,” explains Vitalii Usyk, a Ukrainian archaeologist and co-author of the study who participated in the excavations at Korolevo and now works at the Institute of Archaeology of the CAS in Brno. “We spotted seven periods of human occupation in the stratigraphic layers although at least nine different Palaeolithic cultures were recorded in the locality: hominins lived here from 1.4 million years ago until about 30,000 years ago,” the researcher adds.
The discovery shows the importance of integrating findings from various scientific disciplines to learn about the past. Without the knowledge and technological capabilities of nuclear physics and geophysical sciences, the archaeologists would not have been able to conclusively confirm that the stone tools dated to this early period.
Cosmic clock for human history
The cobble-sized clast samples from the lowermost cultural layer of the Korolevo site were chemically processed and measured by researchers from the Czech Republic and Germany at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) analysis. In 2022, the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS opened an AMS laboratory in Řež, making it now possible to conduct similar measurements in the Czech Republic.
Burial-dating methods using cosmogenic nuclides can date rocks as old as five million years. “At the Korolevo site, we specifically measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 which have different half-lives, 1.39 million years and 708 thousand years respectively. These nuclides form in the quartz when it is at the surface due to cosmogenic radiation from the 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 had been buried beneath the ground surface,” explains Roman Garba, an archaeologist who implements applied nuclear physics methods in his research. Therefore we can use this to calculate their age since burial.
New dating approach implemented for the very first time in archaeology
Determining the age of sediments containing the stone tools fell to the geochronological expertise of Mads Knudsen from Aarhus University, Denmark, and John Jansen from the Institute of Geophysics of the CAS (ASCR).
“We applied two complementary dating approaches to calculate the age from the measured concentrations of cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminium-26. But the most precise age came from our own method based on mathematical modelling, known as P-PINI. This study is the first time our new dating approach has been applied in archaeology,” John Jansen says. “I expect our new dating approach will have a major impact on archaeology because it can be applied to sedimentary deposits that are highly fragmented, meaning there are lots of erosional gaps. In archaeology we nearly always find fragmented records, whereas the traditional long-range dating method, magnetostratigraphy, relies on more continuous records.”
A candidate for distinction?
The archaeological site of Korolevo is unique in its record of waves of colonisation spanning the last 1.4 million years. It has now become the oldest archaeological site in Europe. “Such a site deserves to be potentially inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It will be necessary to begin the negotiations and process regarding the required paperwork, including a plan for the protection of the site, as it is located in the area of an active andesite quarry,” Garba points out.
A symposium in Kyiv on the Korolevo site is considered for 2024, with lectures and workshops. 2024 marks 50 years since the discovery of the site, and the team of involved researchers in collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv is planning an international conference next year.
The research was conducted on the basis of an agreement between the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS and the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine signed in 2021. The project was supported by the European Commission (Horizon 2020, RADIATE, 824096), the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000728 and LM2018120), the Czech Science Foundation (22-13190S), and the Charles University Grant Agency (310222).
In addition to the Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS, the Institute of Geophysics of the CAS, and the Institutes of Archaeology of the CAS in Brno and Prague, the Czech research institutions involved were the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology of the Faculty of Science, Charles University and the Czech Geological Survey. Regarding the international involvement of institutions, it is necessary to mention the Institute of Archaeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine), Helmholz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Germany), Aarhus University (Denmark), Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia), and Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine).
Publication:
Further details can be found in the study published in Nature.
- Garba, V. Usyk, L. Ylä-Mella, J. Kameník, K. Stübner, J. Lachner, G. Rugel , F. Veselovský, N. Gerasimenko , A. I. R. Herries, J. Kučera, M. F. Knudsen & J. D. Jansen. East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4-million-years-ago. Nature 627 (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07151-3
Contact information:
Ing. Mgr. Roman Garba, Ph.D.
Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS and Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Prague
+420 266 172 652, +420 910 256 703, + 420 212 241 683
Vitalii Usyk, Ph.D.
Institute of Archaeology of the CAS, Brno
+420 519 517 637
Ing. Jan Kameník, Ph.D.
Nuclear Physics Institute of the CAS
+420 212 241 683, +420 910 256 703
John Jansen, Ph.D. (English only)
Institute of Geophysics of the CAS
RNDr. František Veselovský
Czech Geological Survey
+420 251 085 202
Prof. Ing. Jan Kučera, CSc.
Ústav jaderné fyziky AV ČR
+420 212 241 671