PEOPLING

Homo sapiens Reaches Europe

~45,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

Homo sapiens had reached Bacho Kiro Cave, in Bulgaria, by about 45,000 years ago, leaving a new toolkit and pendants cut from cave bear teeth. The evidence is a few bone fragments, picked out of thousands by their proteins and dated directly. Their genomes hold Neanderthal ancestors only a few generations back, and these first Europeans turn out to be closer kin to later peoples of East Asia and the Americas than to the Europeans who came after them.

Why it matters

Europe was entered several times, not settled once. The Bacho Kiro people mixed with the Neanderthals they met, perhaps commonly, then their line faded from the continent, its closest surviving relatives lying east 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

Radiocarbon run directly on the human bones and on the layer that held them dates the Bacho Kiro assemblage to 45,820 to 43,650 calibrated years, with a start possibly as early as 46,940. Genomes of three individuals fall between 45,930 and 42,580 years. Older traces of our species have been claimed elsewhere in Europe, but none combines 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