According to researchers, the oldest stone tools ever found in Europe are 1.4 million years old and come from what is now Ukraine. Apparently the first people came to the continent by a different route than expected.
At first glance they look like rubble. They are primitive tools that archaeologists discovered many years ago in the mud and loess sediments of the Tisza, a tributary of the Danube. The stones, which emerged 14 meters below the surface, had apparently been deliberately cut off by people to add sharp edges to the stones in order to cut up and skin animals. But as inconspicuous as these stones look, their scientific dating is spectacular, which a research team led by Roman Garba from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague has now carried out in the specialist magazine Nature reported. The tools are therefore 1.4 million years old, which means that the tools testify to the “earliest, reliably dated hominin presence in Europe,” the authors write. This result surprised them, says Garba: “We expected it to be around a million years old.”