Archaeologists in Georgia have discovered a tooth that dates back 1.8 million years and is from the early human species.
According to a Reuters report, the finding was found last week by a research student in the town of Orozmani, which is located 100 kilometres southwest of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. The area is adjacent to Dmanisi, where 1.8 million-year-old human skulls were found in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The experts believe that the recent discovery clearly establishes the region as the site of the oldest prehistoric human settlements in Europe, and maybe anyplace else outside of Africa. The research is still based on guesses, thus.
What does the research group have to say?
According to the center’s press release, “Orozmani and Dmanisi comprise the heart of the oldest dispersion of ancient humans — or early Homo — in the world outside of Africa.
The discovery’s implications are “enormous,” according to British archaeology student Jack Peart, who found the tooth nearby Orozmani.
According to Giorgi Bidzinashvili, the team’s scientific leader, the teeth may have belonged to a “relative” of Zezva and Mzia, the people whose nearly complete 1.8 million-year-old petrified skulls were found in Dmanisi.
The earliest fossilised human remains are fragments of the jaw, which date to about 2.8 million years ago and were discovered in modern-day Ethiopia.
It is believed that Homo erectus, a hunter-gatherer species that existed before modern humans, fled Africa roughly 2 million years ago. Although ancient tools dating to about 2.1 million years ago have been discovered in modern-day China, the Georgian sites are home to the oldest early human remains ever uncovered outside of Africa.
Research has been going on for years
The team started digging at Orozmani in 2019, however they were forced to push back their trip until 2020 due to the pandemic. They increased their efforts the previous year. Along with the tooth, they also discovered ancient tools and the remains of extinct animals, such as saber-toothed cats and Etruscan wolves. Recent excavations in Dmanisi, Georgia, also uncovered the remains of one of the earliest known hunting dogs, which dates to roughly 1.8 million years ago.
About the human evolution
According to fossils and DNA, people with our morphology—anatomically modern Homo sapiens—evolved about 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, the evidence provided by archaeology—tools, artefacts, and cave paintings—indicates that complex societies and technology—”behavioral modernity”—emerged quite recently, between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago.
Some academics see this as proof that the earliest Homo sapiens weren’t quite modern. The varied data, however, tracks a variety of things. DNA, cultural artefacts, and skulls all reveal details about the brain. Our brains probably developed before our cultures.
Early Homo sapiens descended from ancestral species, yet it is unclear exactly which animals were our immediate ancestors. This is accurate because both extinct creatures and those who lived before us can be seen in the fossil record of humans.
Because many fossil beds only include a few bones or incomplete skeletons, it can be difficult to determine the exact relationships between different species. Archaeologists frequently identify new species, which complicates things even more.
The answer was found in 2019 by a group of researchers from the University of Sydney and the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, under the direction of geneticist Vanessa Hayes.
The team looked into linguistics, historical climatic models, and contemporary mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). They compared DNA from 200 living people from different tribes to the mtDNA in databases from more than 1,000 other Africans, mostly from southern Africa.
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