12 October 2021 :
Pedro Horta - Dissecting the latest discoveries from Bacho Kiro Cave (Bulgaria):
Understanding the first (human) Europeans.
Humans as a species (Homo sapiens) appeared sometime in the middle late Pleistocene in Africa. The finds in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco have pushed the date of the emergence of modern humans as early as 300 000 years ago (Hublin et. al 2017). From that moment onwards humans started to expand their territory throughout Africa and in soon after into Eurasia slowly replacing all species that populated these areas. Recent discoveries in Bacho Kiro Cave (Bulgaria) have revealed the earliest human occupation in Europe at around 45k years ago (Hublin et al., 2020), in other words, the first Human Europeans. Interestingly, the site has been excavated for nearly a century and also has evidence of Neanderthal presence. Nevertheless, this discovery marks one of the most important archaeological finds in the last decade and serves as an important key towards unravelling the mysteries of the arrival of humans into a Neanderthal Europe.
Serving as a continuation of previous talks, (“Modern Humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans” and “The emergence and expansion of Modern Humans throughout the Old World”) this talk will explore these recent finds in Bacho Kiro and taking into consideration the most current data available in the literature, it will discuss the life of the first humans in Europe. In a moment where immigration to Europe is at its highest peak in decades it is interesting to reflect on who the first human Europeans were and where they came from.
Picture by N. Zahariev
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Picture by Tsenka Tsanova
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References
Hublin, J. et al. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 558, (2017).
Hublin, J.-J., Sirakov, N., Aldeias, V., Bailey, S., Bard, E., Delvigne, V., Endarova, E., Fagault, Y., Fewlass, H., Hajdinjak, M., 2020. Initial upper palaeolithic homo sapiens from bacho kiro cave, Bulgaria. Nature. 581, 299–302.
Hublin, J. et al. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 558, (2017).
Hublin, J.-J., Sirakov, N., Aldeias, V., Bailey, S., Bard, E., Delvigne, V., Endarova, E., Fagault, Y., Fewlass, H., Hajdinjak, M., 2020. Initial upper palaeolithic homo sapiens from bacho kiro cave, Bulgaria. Nature. 581, 299–302.
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Pedro Horta is a Paleolithic archaeologist interested in the evolution of hominin adaptation and migration strategies from the earliest stone tool industries to the more complex stone tools used by modern humans. He is currently a PhD student and a Research fellow at ICArEHB, University of Algarve, where he completed his MA and BA. His ongoing PhD project (funded by the FCT) is generating new data on how bipolar stone tool strategies impacted the arrival and settlement of early modern humans in Europe. He has participated in a number of Paleolithic fieldwork projects in Europe and North and Southeastern Africa. Currently, he is involved with projects in Portugal (Vale Boi, Gruta da Companheira, Torre da Fuzeta and Gruta do Escoural), France (Abri Pataud) and Bulgaria (Bacho Kiro). All of which are focused on hominin adaptations just prior and after the arrival of modern humans in Europe, a subject which Horta has mainly focused and published on. |
