Not our species

(NLDO) - A site in Spain has been identified as the first place in Europe to have footprints of a species belonging to the Homo genus.

A study just published in the journal Earth-Science Reviews has helped settle one of the longest-standing debates in paleoanthropology: When did prehistoric humans arrive in Europe?

Sci-News quoted paleoanthropologist Luis Gibert from the University of Barcelona (Spain), the lead author of the study: "The timeline of Homo migration out of Africa has expanded significantly over the past four decades."

Homo is one of four extant hominin species, the genus to which we and our closest relatives belong.

1.32 million years ago, a species of the genus Homo conquered Europe - Illustration AI: Anh Thu

Although some species of the genus Homo still have hominid features, in general all have crossed the evolutionary line significantly to become similar to modern humans in many ways.

In 1982, the oldest evidence of Homo in Asia dated by paleomagnetic methods was 0.9 million years ago in Java (Indonesia) and 0.7 million years ago in Italy in Europe.

Forty years later, the date of the first Homo outside Africa was extended to 1.8 million years ago through sites in the South Caucasus (a region on the border between Asia and Europe).

Additionally, evidence of Homo 1.7–2.1 million years ago has been found in China and 1.5–1.3 million years ago in Java.

In Europe, paleomagnetic data later also showed that some sites with Homo traces were older than the 0.77 million year mark.

This time, the authors used magnetostratigraphic dating, a dating method based on the state of the Earth's magnetic field at the time the sediments formed, to study five sites in the Orce region of Spain.

These five sites are all stratified and lie within a sedimentary sequence longer than 80 m.

They identified three sites that contained traces of Homo species, dating back to 1.32 million years (Venta Micena site), 1.28 million years (Barranco León-5) and 1.23 million years (Fuente Nueva-3) respectively.

Of course, at this time, the humans who conquered Europe were not our species. At that time, there were many human species on Earth, the most prominent of which was Homo erectus, nicknamed "upright man", which appeared about 2 million years ago.

It wasn't until 300,000 years ago that Homo sapiens - or "wise man", that's us - came into being.

New findings suggest that the Strait of Gibraltar – a narrow strait connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean – may have been a key gateway for a major migration of species from Africa to Europe, from apes to hippos.

As for why humans came to Europe after Asia, the research team believes that it was because they had to wait until they had the necessary technology to overcome the maritime barrier, just like what happened 1 million years ago on the island of Flores - Indonesia.

The current Gibraltar route covers a distance of up to 14 km, but it is likely that this distance was shorter at certain times in the past due to the strong tectonic activity in the area and the large, sometimes very low, fluctuations in sea level.

Many other African animals also migrated through Gibraltar between 6.2 and 5.5 million years ago, when the strait was much narrower than it is now.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/bat-ngo-ve-nguoi-chau-au-dau-tien-khong-phai-loai-chung-ta-196240717081610296.htm