An international team of scientists from Denmark, the Czech Republic and other countries has discovered Europe’s oldest stone tools in western Ukraine. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Nature.
Archaeologists examined scrapers made from volcanic rocks. These artifacts were first obtained during work at the Korolevo quarry in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine in the 1970s.
According to various estimates, the age of the instruments was between 1.4 million and 1 million years, as shown by a study using modern dating methods.
“This is the earliest evidence of any human species in Europe,” said study co-author Mads Faurshu Knudsen, a geophysicist at Aarhus University in Denmark.
It is unclear which early ancestors of modern humans made these tools. They may belong to Homo erectus or representatives of Homo erectus. Archaeologists suggest that stone tools may have been used to cut meat and skin animals.
The oldest stone tools of this type were found in East Africa and date back 2.8 million years.
Scientists believe that people from Africa were able to go much further north and settle in various environments thanks to these tools during migration.
Earlier archaeologists I learnedThat Neanderthals knew how to prepare complex types of glue and make handles for tools from them.