Nearly all human fossils older than 100,000 years have been found in isolation. Not so the remains of five early humans from around 1.8 million years ago, unearthed from an area of just 300 square metres in Dmanisi, Georgia. The question is: why were they found together?
According to anthropologist Henry de Lumley of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris it’s because they were all killed when a volcano 20 kilometres west of the site erupted, smothering the group with ash. The Roman town of Pompeii was buried in a similar way in AD 79.
The Dmanisi site, which was found in 1993, is important because it proves that early humans migrated into Asia soon after the genus Homo appeared in Africa. The five skulls have been identified as two teenage females, two adult males and one older toothless individual.
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The bones are exceptionally well preserved, and their position indicates that they had not been disturbed after death, ruling out the possibility that they had been thrown together in a flood. Now soil analysis has indicated that the area is covered in volcanic ash, which de Lumley has linked with a nearby volcano. He speculates that the group were rapidly overcome by ash that fell when the volcano erupted (Comptes Rendus Palevol, vol 7, p 61).
Not everyone is convinced, however. Reid Ferring of the University of North Texas claims the bones lie in different ash layers, implying that there was more than one fall of ash and that the individuals died at different times over a period of 100 years or so.
Adam Van Arsdale of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says the site also contains thousands of animal bones, many piled on top of each other, with some showing cut marks from human tools and gnawing by carnivores. It’s not clear how the bones were deposited, he told 91av. “It’s impossible to explain everything we have by a single event.”
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