Evidence from a site in Romania suggests a hominin presence nearly 2 million years ago. The analysis and dating of multiple cut-marked fossil bones discovered at the site of Grăunceanu in Romania by a team of scientists indicates they were produced by stone tools used by hominins more than 1.95 million years ago. The team used biostratigraphic and high-resolution U-Pb dating to determine the age of the activity. Given the finding within the context of sites showing other deep-time ephemeral traces of hominin activity over a widespread geographic area of Eurasia, the “results, presented along multiple other lines of evidence, point to a widespread, though perhaps intermittent, presence of hominins across Eurasia by at least 2.0 Ma,” writes the co-authors of the recently published study.*
The oldest known actual hominin fossils in Eurasia were discovered at the the site of Dmanisi, Georgia,beginning in 1991.
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Sites shown in blue text are suggested to be > 2 Ma. Inset in the lower left corner shows locations of fossil sites discussed in this study. Citations for fossil localities are provided in Supplementary Data 4. Blank world map data with country borders was drawn from Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0). Map inset images are drawn from satellite imagery available via Google Earth (GoogleLandsat / CopernicusData SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCOGeoBasis-DE/BKG ©2009 and GoogleAirbusMaxar TechnologiesCNES / Airbus). CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, from Curran, S.C., Drăgușin, V., Pobiner, B. et al. Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago. Nat Commun 16, 836 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9
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Selected images of high-confidence cut-marked specimens from the Olteţ River Valley assemblage. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, from Curran, S.C., Drăgușin, V., Pobiner, B. et al. Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago. Nat Commun 16, 836 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9
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*Curran, S.C., Drăgușin, V., Pobiner, B. et al. Hominin presence in Eurasia by at least 1.95 million years ago. Nat Commun 16, 836 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56154-9
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