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Researchers have been able to date the earliest hominin sites in Europe trough magnetostratigraphic dating. They believe that hominins may have migrated into Europa over Gibraltar around 1,3 million years ago. That is half a million years later than the earliest migration to Asia 1,8 million years ago.
quote:Highlights
This study helps resolve when did early hominins arrive in Europe?
Hominin sites are dated between the Olduvai and Jaramillo magnetic subchrons for the first time in Europe.
A Bayesian age-stratigraphic model provides Europe's oldest and most accurate early Pleistocene hominin ages.
Hominins with Oldowan tools entered Europe for the first time ∼ 0.5 Ma after first leaving Africa.
This migration occurred ∼0.5 Ma before the arrival of Acheulian technology in Europe.
The Strait of Gibraltar was a permeable barrier for early Pleistocene hominins
Africa: 22. Ain Hanech, Ain Ain Boucherit 23. Thomas-1, 24. Gona, 25. Konso Kandula, 26. Omo, 27. Lokalalei, 28 Lomekwi, 29 Kokiselei 30, Kobi Fora, 31 Gaded, 32 M. Awash, 33 Hadar, 34 Ledi Geraru, 35 Olduvai, 36 Peninj, 37 Mwanganda, 38. Sterkfontein, 39 Swartkrans, 40 Vaal River
Djehuti Member # 6698
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^ Asking about the first Sapiens population to enter Europe is difficult enough since there is a probability of Sapiens entering Europe before the 40,000 BCE advent of Cromagnon. But Hominins in general is more so difficult to answer since there is debate as to when Neanderthals entered Europe and if they were the only ones to do so.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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Yes, in many cases we have no skeletal material but only tools and similar. Sometimes one can make assumptions about exactly which hominin who left the tools since one now and then come across artifacts which are associated with human remains. But many times one can only know that some kind of hominin were active at a certain place at a certain time. But to sort out their relationship one need remains, and even better DNA.
There are some rather old remains outside Africa, like the 1,8 million years old remains from Dmanisi in Georgia which first were named Homo georgicus but now more often are referred to as Homo erectus.
Archeopteryx Member # 23193
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In the future we can hopefully learn more about relatedness among different ancient hominins through analyze of proteins, even if there is no preserved DNA.
quote:Abstract The evolutionary relationships among extinct African hominin taxa are highly debated and largely unresolved, due in part to a lack of molecular data. Even within taxa, it is not always clear, based on morphology alone, whether ranges of variation are due to sexual dimorphism versus potentially undescribed taxonomic diversity. For Paranthropus robustus, a Pleistocene hominin found only in South Africa, both phylogenetic relationships to other taxa 1,2 and the nature of intraspecific variation 36 are still disputed. Here we report the mass spectrometric (MS) sequencing of enamel proteomes from four ca. 2 million year (Ma) old dental specimens attributed morphologically to P. robustus, from the site of Swartkrans. The identification of AMELY-specific peptides and semi-quantitative MS data analysis enabled us to determine the biological sex of all the specimens. Our combined molecular and morphometric data also provide compelling evidence of a significant degree of variation within southern African Paranthropus, as previously suggested based on morphology alone. Finally, the molecular data also confirm the taxonomic placement of Paranthropus within the hominin clade. This study demonstrates the feasibility of recovering informative Early Pleistocene hominin enamel proteins from Africa. Crucially, it also shows how the analysis of these proteins can contribute to understanding whether hominin morphological variation is due to sexual dimorphism or to taxonomic differences. We anticipate that this approach can be widely applied to geologically-comparable sites within South Africa, and possibly more broadly across the continent.
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