Europe's oldest sites are... surprisingly old.

This is the oldest face ever found in Western Europe, nicknamed Pink. It belonged to someone who lived and hunted and died in these hills about 1.4 million years ago. Today we call the site Atapuerca, one of the most important sites in Paleolithic archaeology. I mean, 1.4 million years ago is so old that all of our assumptions about humans and how humans live kind of go out the window. We don't know if they had a name, we don't know how they got there, we don't know if they could communicate, we know almost nothing about them. But we do know that this is perhaps one of the first humans, the first hominins, to ever leave Africa and venture north into Europe. When we talk about extremely old archaeological sites that are earlier in our evolution, Africa and Asia, they kind of steal the spotlight, especially Africa. But what are the oldest archaeological sites in Europe and what can they tell us about our evolution? That's the rabbit hole I'm currently in. In the hills above Dmanisi, Georgia sits a beautiful medieval church, but underneath it archaeologists found something much older. The skulls of five ancient hominins. They were small-brained, ranging from about 600 to just under 800 cc, small-bodied too, maximum 166 centimeters tall and really ancient, really really ancient. These people lived 1.8 million years ago. Dmanisi is so special though because these hominins were almost contemporaries and we have a full span of ages. Dmanisi 3 was a teenager, 1, 2 and 5 were adults and Dmanisi 4 was older. They had lost their teeth and their jawbones had been reabsorbed by the sockets. So they had lived quite a while with no teeth. They were old probably. They'd be gumming up their food, gumming it up for sure. It's a totally unique site, 1.8 million years old, kind of a almost complete demographic spread. It's so special. It's probably the most special archaeological site, paleolithic archaeological site outside of Africa. For the purposes of this video though, when I think of Europe I'm thinking somewhere further west. Georgia to me kind of is European culturally but it just had to be mentioned because it's basically the best insight we have into hominins that lived 1.8 million years ago. We can't not mention it. But were they the same hominins that were at Atapuerca 400,000 years later? It's difficult to say. Even if they have some similarities on the surface level, they could have been very different if we could actually rewind the clock and see them interact. They could have been very different. It's so hard to say though. It's so hard to say. The only major clue we perhaps have to how these people were living is the tools they left behind. Humans love a tool and there's one really special site way further west in Europe. Orsing, Andalusia. More than 1,000 stone tools have been found here dated to between 1.4 and 1.2 million years old. Typically when I imagine tools in Europe from the Upper Paleolithic, I'm picturing, you know, great big nice Acheulean hand axes. So beautiful. I love this. So distinctive. Incredible artifacts. But the tools at Orsing are simpler. There's Oldowan style tools like this. Just a few flakes being removed off a core. Hammer stones. Very very simple tools. The simple tools that hominins had been using since 3 million years ago. Archaeologists in Spain were even able to refit some of the tools to put the flakes back together. Which I always love to see because that's really the closest you can get to understanding the decisions in the mind of an ancient hominin. That's as close as we can get truly. In our day and age of near constant technological progress, it is kind of mind blowing to imagine millions of years going by without much technological change. And that almost certainly reflects some form of cognitive limitation on the part of these hominins. But it didn't seem to hold them back that much. These are the butchered remains of some of the animals at the site. There's elephants, rhinos, deer, horses, hyenas, even hippos. Big animals. Tough animals. There is evidence of carnivores at the site, but less evidence than the bones with cut marks. So it's really debated how are these hominins getting access to these animals. Are they hunting them? Are they scavenging them? On the one hand it's hard to imagine with such simple tools taking down such big prey as a hippo. But we're entirely missing all the wooden tools they may have used. Another possibility is that maybe they're bullying animals off their prey just by their sheer numbers perhaps. Or just using flakes to get little bits of meat or break open long bones was enough. Was enough to keep these communities going. It's a huge debate. But what Orsay and also Ediminisi really show is that this like journey of hominins out of Africa, it could be done with the simplest toolkit that hominins had. It didn't take some at least technological development on the part of stone tools for us to leave Africa and travel north. They could do it with with the simplest of tools. One technology they seemingly did not have at all though was fire. You would be eating your rhino raw, that's for sure. Despite this, hominins made it far north. The hominins venturing north over a million years ago did not have a lot of knowledge to build on. Let's face it, that's just the reality. Now we have so much though. Everything we have truly relies on a thousand ideas that have been spread out over a thousand years. And that's where the sponsor of this video comes in. The book. It's so huge. The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization. Ba ba ba. What a beast of a book. 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It's just great. I really like it. To be curious is to be human. For your own copy of the book, follow the link in the exploring hominins. In the year 2000, on the British seaside town of Haysborough, a man walking his dog found this absolutely gorgeous hand axe. This sparked an investigation into the area and remarkably, the preserved footprints of ancient humans were recovered. The arch of the foot, you have the ball of the foot, you even have indications here of a toe print. Now humans are the only ones with feet like this, there are no animals that roam the world that have a foot that has a big toe that's in line, an arch in the middle of the foot, we're the only ones who have that. We've got a cluster of prints and we can probably say there are at least five individuals. Some of those individuals are adults, one of them possibly a male, but we've also got children so I think we can begin to talk about a family group. I'm sure you've heard of it, it's so famous. These footprints could perhaps be 950,000 years old, an incredible age really. At the time the footprints in Haysborough were laid down, Britain was attached to the continent via a land bridge and as far as we are aware, this is the northernmost expansion of humans at that time. These are the earliest humans to get into northern latitudes anywhere in the world. These are the people who are the sort of pioneers of their age, battling against these extreme conditions and it's remarkable that they survived at all. Without fire, certainly without any form of fitted clothing, like at absolute most just skins draped over you, it's probably quite a harsh environment to live as far north as Britain. Not easy. Very seasonal climate, right? It's not like Africa where it's warm all year or even the Mediterranean. This is a seasonal environment. This prompts all kinds of questions, you know, did they have effective clothing? Did they have shelter? Did they have the controlled use of fire? These are questions that we're still researching today. Whether humans stayed there all year round or just moved further north in the summer, we don't know. But we see a similar picture on the other side of Europe. These tools were excavated in Korolevo, western Ukraine, along the banks of the Tisa river. Like the site in Orsay, they're 1.4 million years old roughly. Again, very simple old one style tools. Once again, humans living in a very seasonal environment. It also makes you wonder which route hominins took into Europe. You always assume it was through Turkey and up the Danube. When you look at where Korolevo is, when you look at Dmanisi is, it could be that hominins entered the continent via the Black Sea. It could be that way. The hardest question of all though, hardest question of all, the hominins at Dmanisi, Korolevo, Hayesborough, Atapuerca, Orsay, were these the same people spreading and enduring across the continent for 500,000 years or a series of small doomed explorations? Arriving, struggling, dying out and being replaced by strangers who never even knew they'd come before. Back to Atapuerca, pink is not the only incredible face to have come from that site. This is the face of a child who lived roughly 800,000 years ago. They were given the name the boy of Grandolina but more recent work suggests maybe they were a girl. The tomboy, the tomboy of Grandolina, let's say, who knows. They were given the name homo antecessor or pioneer man along with other human remains from the site like this adult mandible. They're one the best contenders we have for the kind of hominin that was alive when modern humans and Neanderthals last shared a common ancestor. Another skull came from there. Atapuerca 5 was thought to be the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals but genetics later confirmed they were on the Neanderthal branch of our family tree. They're sort of an early proto-Neanderthal so it pushed it further back in time to the time period that these people were living in. But were they descended from the same population as pink just a few hundred thousand years later? This is basically one of the biggest debates in Paleolithic archaeology. How do all these hominin remains relate to each other? It's so hard to tell, it's so so hard to tell. Currently pink was just classified as homo erectus but really that's because every hominin fossil that's 1.4 million years old gets called homo erectus. There's a huge debate as to whether we should be lumping these all into one species name, coming up with new species names. It's kind of a mess basically. To be honest with you it's kind of a mess. Everything is called homo erectus and it's obviously complicated by the fact that thanks to genetics we now know that like different appearing humans like us modern humans and Neanderthals are admixing. So we just don't know what to do. We just don't know what to do. Nature doesn't love a nice clear line like our organizational brains do. If I was to bet, if I was a gambling man, I think it's most likely that all these hominins are unrelated to each other. That these are waves of humans pushing the limits of their territorial expansion and then dying out as climates and conditions change. I would bet that's the case. But none of these sites I've mentioned so far are the oldest evidence of humans in Europe. Sorry I had to throw on Romanian news there. Grăunceanu, Romania on the southern border with Bulgaria. Here archaeologists found a treasure trove of ancient animals. 4983 bones all in all. At first glance it seemed that these bones were just deposited by natural processes. I mean they were deposited by natural processes but you know just dropped there by a river. Nothing too interesting about it. Apologies to paleontologists out there. On 20 of the bones though it seems like there's quite clear evidence of cut marks. Scratched marks along the ends of them. Marks from a meal eaten perhaps 1.95 million years ago. Sadly at the site there were no stone tools or hominin remains. So it is debated. Are we truly looking at human activity here? There is a whole science dedicated to understanding cut marks. It's for those guys to debate. I can't possibly comment on that. The scientific method just has to has to do its thing and we'll argue about the evidence for years probably. But it's not the only site that's kind of pushing back the date for hominins leaving Africa to 2 million years ish. And if correct the first hominins to ever enter Europe may have looked like this chap or chapette. Maybe more like a homo habilis. Really small brained hominin. This one is also about 1.95 million years old but comes from Kenya way down in Africa. If true it does show that even like tiny brained hominins were showing such a degree of like flexibility. Habitat flexibility that you know we didn't fully anticipate at all. It's it's interesting. Really interesting. Why did I make this video? Why does any of this matter? I'm not gonna lie I've been feeling really nihilistic especially since kind of the pictures from the Artemis moon launch came out. And just really once again revealed our universe to be so cold lifeless. Nothing but death for us out there. There's life somewhere else in the universe but it's probably not close to us and there's a lot of death in between us and them. And it kind of sent me down a nihilistic spiral. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie. But one thing that has kind of perked me up when I'm thinking about these super ancient sites is like the connection between humans and landscape right. Whenever I go back to England there are these really iconic hills close to my hometown the Malvern Hills. They're very beautiful. Very iconic. And when I'm traveling home I can see them from a long way away. And my first sight of them is always you know the first sign that I'm I'm home almost. I'm so close to home. If I see them I'm home. It boggles the mind. It's it's incredible to think that perhaps a million years hominins could have felt that way. That a million years ago someone was walking through that same landscape saw the Malvern Hills and thought they were home. They were home. It's kind of got me back to earth a little bit. Grounded again. Back to earth. I didn't even script that. Excuse the pun. Sorry. Sorry uh space fans. We're just all part of a great chain of being man. And the landscapes we love and enjoy have perhaps been loved and enjoyed for two million years. Or they thought it was cold and rubbish. Like we do still too.