Josep Maria PARÉS

Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), Burgos 09002 Spain

FIRST PARAGRAPH:  All current evidence points to Africa as the place where the human lineage originated. However, the questions of when humans first left the continent and where they went in Eurasia remain highly controversial [1-4]. Until the mid 1990’s, most researchers would have accepted a date of about 1.2 Ma as a maximum for the first appearance of Homo erectus in Eurasia [5]. In western Eurasia the earliest human fossils were dated to 0.5 Ma, but archaeological discoveries within the past twelve years have reopened the question of the age of the first Europeans [6-8]. Findings in Atapuerca provided the oldest direct evidence for a human presence in Europe at around 1.2 Myr [9]. The most parsimonious interpretation of this finding in the Sierra de Atapuerca is that Western Europe was settled during the Early Pleistocene by a hominin population coming from the east. It has been suggested that this population may be related to the first demographic expansion out of Africa, currently represented by the Dmanisi hominins [9]. The validation of such hypothesis is hampered by the absence of an accurate chronostratigraphic context for early to Middle Pleistocene sites [1,4]. A solid knowledge of the chronology, biostratigraphy and geologic context of hominin sites would enable us to address important issues such as possible migration routes, whether there were several pulses of migration and the role of climate and/or technical-cultural selection on the expansion outside Africa.