Discoveries may show how early humans migrated

The fossil bones and tools of Stone Age humans in Russia, and a single skull from South Africa, have provided scientists with new evidence of the routes our ancient ancestors took as they spread across continents before they reached North America, researchers report.

The findings illuminate the course of human evolutionary history from the time when the first near-modern humans reportedly appeared in sub-Saharan Africa about 190,000 years ago to the generations of today that populate the entire world.

Dug from a pit at a well-known archaeology site 250 miles from Moscow by U.S. and Russian anthropologists, the fossils and tools show for the first time that the people who migrated from Africa were fully modern humans by the time they arrived in Europe and thrived there some 45,000 years ago.

That discovery was bolstered when another international team reported that a human skull found nearly 55 years ago in a gully near the South African village of Hofmeyr came from a modern human who lived about 35,000 years ago — not much later than the early Europeans. The skull's date, however, is expected to be controversial.

The reports by both teams are described in the journal Science, published Friday.

The saga of the human race and its early travels are still only dimly understood. As Ted Goebel, an anthropologist at the center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, said "it is one of the greatest untold stories in the history of mankind."

Part of that story has been revealed in recent years by anthropologists and archaeologists who have found the bones and tools of more recent ancient humans at many sites across Europe and central Asia.

But the tools discovered at a site called Kostenki on the Don River are the earliest ever found. The trove has been dated at 42,000 to 45,000 years old by the research team headed by Michael Anikovich and Andrei Sinitsyn of the Russian Academy of Sciences and John Hoffecker of the University of Colorado's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

The tools are made of stone, animal bones and ivory and include a sewing needle with an eye, as well as a badly eroded figurine — possibly the oldest work of art ever found, Hoffecker said.

The South African skull, its age long unknown, was newly dated by scientists at Oxford in England and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The group was headed by Frederick Grine, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University on Long Island, who is now examining the skull anew before sending it back to colleagues in South Africa.