Early humans began existing in Europe around 1.3 million years ago. This Strait showed them the way

In a new study, it has been discovered that the human remains discovered at the Orce sites in Spain were nearly 1.3 million years old.

The discovery was made when the researchers, headed by Lluis Gibert at theUniversity of Barcelona, re-dated the remains.

The latest discovery supports the theory that early humans reached Europe while passing through the Strait of Gibraltar and did not opt for the Mediterranean route via Asia.

“After a century of research, the chronology of the first arrival of hominins in Europe remains controversial. Four Spanish localities potentially record evidence of the oldest Europeans, yet arrival ages remain loosely constrained between 1.6 and 0.9 Ma,” said the researchers.

“Here we provide a new Early Pleistocene magnetostratigraphy, recording four paleomagnetic boundaries within 80 m of a fluvio-lacustrine sedimentary succession in Orce, southeastern Spain," they added.

“This Pleistocene succession incorporates for the first time in Europe five superposed paleontological localities between the Olduvai and Jaramillo magnetozones, including three hominin sites providing evidence of the presence of hominins older than 1.07 Ma in Europe," the researchers explained.

How scientists dated unsampled area

The palaeomagnetism of a previously unsampled area, which was protected from erosion, was analysed and the new dating details were found.

With the new data, the Venta Micena site was placed at 1.32 million years ago (Ma), Barranco León at 1.28 Ma, and Fuente Nueva 3 at 1.23 Ma, which went beyond the age of the Sima del Elefante site in Atapuerca.

“The uniqueness of these sites is that they are stratified and within a very long sedimentary sequence, more than eighty meters long,” said Gibert.

The researchers also found the magnetic polarity sequence and the Orce sites were placed between 1.77 and 1.07 million years ago.

“Having identified a detailed, extended magnetostratigraphy encompassing the fossil sites, we then estimated their age by stratigraphic interpolation,” the researchers explained.

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“A Bayesian age-stratigraphic model was employed and formulated with the prior condition that strata monotonically decrease in age upward," said the researchers.

The team analysed the fauna at Orce to finalise the dating and compared it with other Early Pleistocene sites in Europe.

The dating also suggested that the early humans entered Europe through the Strait of Gibraltar.

“We also defend the hypothesis that they arrived from Gibraltar because no older evidence has been found at any other site along the alternative route,” said Gibert.

(With inputs from agencies)