East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago

Stone tools stratified in alluvium and loess at Korolevo, western Ukraine, have been studied by multiple research groups (Gladilin 1989; Adamenko & Gladilin 1989; Koulakovska et al. 2010) since the site’s discovery in the 1970s. Despite wide acknowledgement of Korolevo’s importance to the European Palaeolithic, age of the lowermost lithic artefacts have remained inconclusive. Here we report ages of 1.37 ± 0.09 million years ago (Ma) and 1.45 ± 0.06 Ma for the sedimentary unit containing Mode-1-type lithic artefacts based on two cosmogenic nuclide burial dating methods (Balco & Rovey 2008; Knudsen et al. 2020). Korolevo stands as the earliest securely dated hominin presence in Europe and bridges the spatial and temporal gap between the Caucasus (~1.8 Ma at Dmanisi) (Ferring et al. 2011) and Iberia (recalculated to ~1.1 Ma at Atapuerca) (Carbonell et al. 2008). Our findings advance the hypothesis of colonisation of Europe from the east, and an analysis of habitat suitability (Timmerman et al. 2022) suggests that early hominins potentially exploited warm interglacial periods to disperse into higher latitudes and relatively continental sites, such as Korolevo, well before the Middle Pleistocene Transition.