Lineage separation· Where Sapiens lives
The western branch turns towards Europe
46.9 ka
The western half of the split heads into a continent Neanderthals had held for hundreds of thousands of years.
What the evidence shows
The chronology comes from radiocarbon on a large series of newly excavated animal and human bones at Bacho Kiro: the Initial Upper Palaeolithic there is secure between 45,820 and 43,650 calibrated years ago, and a Middle Palaeolithic occupation older than 51,000 years lies below, separated by a gap of more than three millennia. The genetics complicates the picture rather than confirming it. The three sequenced individuals are closer to present-day East Asians and Native Americans than to the West Eurasians who followed, and the deepest known split from the out-of-Africa lineage, at Ranis and Zlatý kůň, belongs to a small, isolated population of its own.
Dating & uncertainty
The earliest modern humans known in Europe, at Bacho Kiro, are dated between 45,900 and 42,600 years ago, and most of them left no descendants among Europeans today. What separates here is a lineage, not the individuals whose bones we happen to have.
Sources
- Hajdinjak et al. (2021), Nature · Initial Upper Paleolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry
- Hublin et al. (2020), Nature · Initial Upper Palaeolithic Homo sapiens from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria
- Fewlass et al. (2020), Nature Ecology & Evolution · A 14C chronology for the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition at Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria
- Sümer et al. (2024), Nature · Earliest modern human genomes constrain timing of Neanderthal admixture