A 1.8-million-year-old human jawbone has been found in Georgia, which may belong to a direct ancestor of modern humans, Homo erectus.
Archaeologist Giorgi Bidzinashvili, who has been leading excavations at the Orozman Paleolithic site in Tbilisi since 2020, says the find “may shed new light on the reasons why our ancestors left Africa.” The first excavations at Orozman yielded stone tools and ancient animal bones, and in 2022, a single Homo erectus tooth.
Research suggests that both sites are contemporaneous, dating back about 1.8 million years. Although only one tooth and a jaw fragment have been discovered at Orozman so far, scientists are confident that these findings indicate that early humans were more widely distributed in the Caucasus than previously thought.
