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Press release | The First Humans Came to Europe 1.4 Million Years Ago - ARUPThis news release slipped beneath my radar back in March 2024, but as it’s now being discussed on social media, I thought I’d take a look and track down the original press release and the publication in Nature.
The news came from the Czech Institute of Archaeology: research by an international team led by Roman Garba, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has uncovered the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe at a site in Ukraine.
This is, like most discoveries in biology, archaeology, and geology, compelling evidence that the Bible’s account of creation is not only wrong, but so far removed from reality that it can’t even be rescued as metaphor or allegory. Increasingly large portions of the Bible now have to be explained away in this manner as mainstream Christianity retreats from the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and the idea of a creator god. What’s left is a dwindling rump of die-hard creationists, clinging desperately to the wreckage of their beliefs as the tsunami of evidence sweeps them further into irrelevance.
The discovery was made at Korolevo, Ukraine, and consisted of stone tools—sadly, no bones were found. If confirmed, this pushes back the timeline of hominin migration into Eurasia by 200,000 to 300,000 years from the previous earliest known date at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. The scale of denialism required to dismiss this discovery can be measured in the response of one such creationist on Facebook:
since the earth is less then [sic] 6,000 years old where was this skeliton [sic – it’s actually a stone tool] for the remiander [sic] of that time seeing there was no universe?
Beryllium-10 (¹⁰Be) and aluminium-26 (²⁶Al) dating:
- Formation of cosmogenic nuclides
- The Earth is constantly bombarded by cosmic rays (high-energy particles from space).
- When these rays strike minerals at or near the Earth’s surface — particularly quartz — they cause spallation reactions, knocking particles out of nuclei and creating rare isotopes such as ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al in a constant ratio.
- These isotopes accumulate in the mineral lattice as long as the rock or sediment is exposed at the surface.
- Radioactive decay
- Both ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al are unstable and decay with known half-lives:
- ¹⁰Be: ~1.39 million years
- ²⁶Al: ~717,000 years
- Because they are produced at a fixed ratio (about 6.75 atoms of ²⁶Al for every atom of ¹⁰Be), any deviation from that ratio tells us something about the exposure/burial history of the sample.
- Dating surface exposure
- If a rock surface has been continuously exposed, the isotopes will build up until production balances decay, giving a concentration that can be used to estimate how long the rock has been exposed.
- Dating burial events
- If the rock is later buried (e.g. under sediment), production of new isotopes effectively stops because cosmic rays cannot penetrate very deep.
- Once buried, the ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be ratio decreases over time because ²⁶Al decays faster.
- Measuring both isotopes in quartz grains allows researchers to calculate when burial occurred, sometimes up to 5 million years ago.
- Application at Korolevo
- At the Korolevo site, the quartz-bearing sediments containing stone tools were analysed.
- By measuring the concentrations and ratios of ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al, the researchers could determine when the sediments were last exposed to cosmic rays before burial.
- This yielded an age of around 1.4 million years, placing the hominin presence there far earlier than previously known in Europe.
So, in short:
- Cosmic rays “charge up” surface rocks with rare isotopes.
- Once buried, the isotopes start “ticking down” at known rates.
- By measuring how much is left (and the ratio between them), scientists can date when sediments were last exposed — and therefore when hominins left their tools there.
Equation for calculating burial age using the ratio of ²⁶Al to ¹⁰Be. \(\small 𝑅_0\) is the expected ratio at steady state, \(\small R_{meas}\) is the measured ratio in the sample, and \(\small \lambda\) values are the decay constants. Because ²⁶Al decays faster than ¹⁰Be, the ratio drops over time after burial, providing a natural clock.
What about the claimed changes in decay rates? Of course, creationists will sometimes try to dismiss radiometric dating by claiming that decay rates must have been different in the past. But in the case of this method, that argument would require two completely different decay processes — beta minus decay in beryllium-10 and beta plus/electron capture decay in aluminium-26 — to have changed in perfect lockstep for over a million years. Any divergence at all would have destroyed the neat, consistent ratios we observe.
Moreover, such a change would demand an alteration of the weak nuclear force itself, one of the so-called “fundamental constants” of physics.
And here’s the irony: creationists also like to claim that we live in a “fine-tuned universe” where even the tiniest change to fundamental parameters would make life — and even atoms — impossible. So their objection requires us to believe that, just at the moment their god was supposedly creating the world, he tinkered with the laws of physics in ways that would have prevented matter itself from existing.
From a historical and anthropological perspective, the interesting thing about this find is that it lends support to the idea that the first hominins to leave Africa (almost certainly Homo erectus) migrated from east to west into Europe, having entered via the Eastern Mediterranean then either migrated across Asia Minor to the Balkans and access to the Danube Valley or though the Caucasus and round the north shore of the Black Sea. The alternative was to have migrated across the Straights of Gibraltar into Iberia and spread from there. The Levant - Caucasus or Danube route would have placed them in modern-day Ukraine earlier that the Iberian route.
The researchers also used a new method of dating that, to the disappointment of creationists, no doubt, doesn't depend on radioactive decay rates, but on the change in the ratio of isotopes of two different elements, so can't be waved away as the result of assumed changing decay rates, unless they can show differential decay rates for different isotopes kept in lockstep for tens of thousands of years - which adds another layer of absurdity to an already absurd, unproven assumption.
The first humans arrived in Europe 1.4 million years ago
The oldest known human settlement in Europe is located near the town of Korolevo in western Ukraine. This has been proven by research by an international team led by Roman Garba from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. Until now, the earliest inhabited place was considered to be a site in Spain. The results, published today in the journal Nature , also prove that the first people took advantage of warm interglacial cycles and colonized Europe from the east or southeast to the west. The precise dating of the samples from Korolevo was made possible by recent advances in mathematical modeling combined with applied nuclear physics.
The results of four years of research, involving scientists from five countries and more than 10 research institutions around the world, including Australia, are among those that are rewriting the textbooks. Previous research had dated the first human settlement of the European continent 200,000 to 300,000 years later, based on findings in Atapuerca, Spain.
The settlement at Korolevo in present-day Transcarpathian Ukraine, near the Ukrainian borders with Romania and Hungary, is also interesting because it is probably the northernmost known occurrence of Homo erectus in the world. The Korolevo site contains only stone tools, but due to its age, it is assumed that Homo erectus may have lived there .
The missing stone: a journey along the Danube
The study changes the view of the migration routes of the "first Europeans" and adds a missing piece to the mosaic of knowledge about the history of the settlement of Europe.
Our oldest ancestor, Homo erectus, was the first to leave Africa around two million years ago and travel to the Middle East, Asia and Europe. The radiometric dating of the first settlement at the Korolevo site not only fills the large spatial gap between Georgia and Spain with the oldest finds to date, but also confirms the hypothesis that people from the first wave of settlement of Europe penetrated from the east or southeast to the west. Based on the calculated age, climate model and pollen data from the field, we identified three possible warm interglacial periods in which the first people could have arrived along the Danube corridor.
Roman Garba, lead author
Nuclear Physics Institute
Czech Academy of Sciences, Řež, Czechia.
The prehistoric center of Europe
The archaeological site of Korolevo is significant on a pan-European scale.
We know that the layer of wind-blown loess and paleosol here reaches a depth of up to 14 meters and contains thousands of stone tools. Korolevo was an important source of raw materials for their production. Seven periods of settlement are represented at the specific researched site, although at least nine different Paleolithic cultures are recorded at the site: people lived here from the oldest age until 30 thousand years ago.
Vitalii Usyk, co-author
Institute of Archaeology
National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine
Now, Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Brno, Czechia.
The discovery highlights the importance of connecting different scientific disciplines to understand the past. Without the knowledge and technological capabilities of nuclear physics and geophysical sciences, archaeologists would not be able to convincingly confirm their hypotheses.
Cosmic rays and nuclear physics in the service of archaeology
Samples of stone cobbles from the oldest excavated layer from the Korolevo site were first chemically processed and measured by scientists from the Czech Republic and Germany at the Helmholtz Center Research Institute using the accelerator mass spectrometry method. In 2022, a similar laboratory was also put into operation by the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Řež, and therefore it is now possible to carry out similar measurements in the Czech Republic.
Cosmogenic nuclide dating is able to determine ages up to five million years from a very small number of atoms in the materials studied.
Specifically, we measured the concentrations of cosmogenic nuclides beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 with different half-lives of transformation, respectively 1.39 million years and 708 thousand years. Before the stones were covered with layers of loess and paleosol, the mentioned radionuclides were created by nuclear fission reactions in the rocks under the effect of secondary cosmic rays, which are formed in the atmosphere under the influence of primary cosmic rays from space. Their ratio changed depending on how long the examined stone boulders from Korolev were stored below the surface.
Roman Garba.
Unique dating methods for the first time in archaeological practice
Determining the age of sediments containing stone tools was mainly addressed by John Jansen from the Geophysical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Mads Knudsen from the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
We used two complementary dating approaches to calculate ages from measured concentrations of cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminium-26. Our own method based on mathematical modelling, known as P-PINI, gave the most accurate results. This project was its first use in an archaeological context. Our new dating approach should have a major impact on archaeology because it can be used in discontinuous sediment sequences, in which there are many time gaps caused by erosion. In archaeology, we usually work with discontinuous time records, while traditional dating methods, such as magnetostratigraphy, rely on longer, more or less continuous strata.
John D. Jansen, co-corresponding author.
GFÚ Institute of Geophysics
Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechia.
Part of Czechoslovakia
The discovery is also connected with the recent history of the Czech Republic. The archaeological site of Korolevo is located about 150 km as the crow flies from Košice, Slovakia. From 1920 to 1938 it was part of the former Czechoslovakia and the place was called Královo nad Tisou. The first discoveries of settlements from the Early Stone Age in Transcarpathian Ukraine were made by the Czechoslovak archaeologist Jozef Skutil.
The research was carried out under a contract between the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic 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 (MŠMT) (CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000728 and LM2018120), the Czech Science Foundation (22-13190S) and the Charles University Science Foundation (310222).
In addition to the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, the Geophysical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and the Archaeological Institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Brno and Prague, the Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology of the Faculty of Science of Charles University and the Czech Geological Survey participated from Czech research institutions. Among foreign institutions, it is necessary to mention the Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Kyiv, Ukraine), Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (Germany), Aarhus University (Denmark), Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia), Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Kyiv, Ukraine).
Publication:
Abstract
Stone tools stratified in alluvium and loess at Korolevo, western Ukraine, have been studied by several research groups1,2,3 since the discovery of the site in the 1970s. Although Korolevo’s importance to the European Palaeolithic is widely acknowledged, age constraints on the lowermost lithic artefacts have yet to be determined conclusively. Here, using two methods of burial dating with cosmogenic nuclides4,5, we report ages of 1.42 ± 0.10 million years and 1.42 ± 0.28 million years for the sedimentary unit that contains Mode-1-type lithic artefacts. Korolevo represents, to our knowledge, the earliest securely dated hominin presence in Europe, and bridges the spatial and temporal gap between the Caucasus (around 1.85–1.78 million years ago)6 and southwestern Europe (around 1.2–1.1 million years ago)7,8. Our findings advance the hypothesis that Europe was colonized from the east, and our analysis of habitat suitability9 suggests that early hominins exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and relatively continental sites—such as Korolevo—well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition.
R. Garba, V. Usyk, L. Ylä-Mella, J. Kameník, K. Stübner, J. Lachner, G. Rugel, F. Veselovský, N. Gerasimenko, AIR Herries, J. Kučera, MF Knudsen & JD Jansen.
East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4-million-years-ago.
Nature 627. (2024) DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3.
© 2024 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The finding at Korolevo is one more in a long line of discoveries that flatly contradict the creationist claim that the Bible is literal history. According to that myth, the universe itself is less than 10,000 years old and humans were created in their present form only days after the Earth came into being. Yet here we have solid archaeological evidence, dated using well-established physics, showing that human relatives were in Europe 1.4 million years ago — two orders of magnitude older than the entire biblical timeline.
This is not a matter of interpretation or “worldviews.” The evidence is in the ground: stone tools buried in sediments that can be dated independently by cosmogenic nuclides. Unless one is prepared to reject physics, chemistry, astronomy, and geology wholesale, the age of these artefacts cannot be reconciled with Genesis. To dismiss it requires either total denial of reality or a belief in a god who deliberately planted misleading evidence to deceive us — neither of which sits well with the idea of an honest, truthful deity.
Nor is this an isolated case. Every branch of science that investigates the past — geology, palaeontology, genetics, archaeology, astronomy — converges on the same conclusion: the Earth is billions of years old, life has evolved over deep time, and humans share a common ancestry with other primates. The Bible’s stories of a recent creation, a global flood, and the early history of humankind are simply Bronze Age myths, not factual records.
That this is “obvious” to anyone outside the creationist echo chamber is borne out by the steady retreat of mainstream Christianity from literalism. Increasingly, theologians are forced to treat large parts of scripture as allegory or metaphor, precisely because the physical evidence has rendered the idea of biblical inerrancy indefensible. What remains is a shrinking fringe, clinging to a collapsing edifice of pseudoscience as discovery after discovery erodes their position.
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