PEOPLING

Homo sapiens Reaches Europe

~45,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Bone fragments from Bacho Kiro Cave, in Bulgaria, identified among thousands by their proteins and dated directly, put Homo sapiens in Europe by about 45,000 years ago, alongside a new toolkit and pendants of cave bear teeth. Their genomes carry Neanderthal ancestors only a few generations back, and, unexpectedly, these first Europeans are closer kin to later East Asians than to the Europeans who came after them.

Why it matters

Europe was entered several times, not settled once. The Bacho Kiro people mixed readily with the Neanderthals they found, then their line faded from the continent, leaving descendants toward Asia instead; later waves repainted Europe's ancestry again and again. The neat story of one arrival replacing the natives dissolves into something more human: repeated migrations, mixed families, lineages that thrive elsewhere or nowhere.

Dating & uncertainty

Direct radiocarbon on the human bones and their layer at Bacho Kiro gives 45,820 to 43,650 calibrated years, probably beginning by 46,940. Genomes of three individuals date to between 45,930 and 42,580 years; older claimed traces of our species in Europe exist but lack this triple anchor of bones, tools and DNA.

Sources

1. Hublin et al. (2020), Nature · Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgariadoi:10.1038/s41586-020-2259-z
2. Hajdinjak et al. (2021), Nature · Initial Upper Paleolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestrydoi:10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3
3. Fewlass et al. (2020), Nature Ecology & Evolution · A 14C chronology for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition at Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgariadoi:10.1038/s41559-020-1136-3

Our species’ history as one day

20:34:173 h 26 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day