Discovery in Bulgaria suggests earliest hominins lived in the Balkans

“According to our findings, the Balkans should be considered the cradle of human evolution,” Prof. Nikolay Spassov told Bulgarian News Agency. He leads an international research team that has published a study on a femur dated to 7.2 million years ago.

The discovery, made near Bulgaria's town of Chirpan, provides evidence that early hominins were capable of moving on two legs.

The publication’s authors include researchers from the National Museum of Natural History at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Tübingen, and the University of Toronto.

The Late Miocene femur they studied most likely belongs to a representative of the genus Graecopithecus, whose first fossil find - a lower jaw of the same age - was discovered near Athens during World War II. Scientists believe this species may be the oldest known direct ancestor of humans.

According to Prof. Nikolay Spassov, this concerns an extremely early stage - the first steps toward bipedalism, which preceded the later development of human ancestors in Africa.

The scientist recalls that Charles Darwin had already considered such a possibility, based on the discovery of a fossil great ape - Dryopithecus - in southern France.

Near the site of the discovery, close to Chirpan and the village of Spasovo, a tooth of an early hominin was also found, similar to analogous discoveries in Turkey and northern Greece.

Edited by Ivo Ivanov
English: R. Petkova