They were small, the tallest barely more than 5 feet. Their bodies were essentially the same as modern humans — from the neck down. Their skulls were another matter, with braincases less than half the size of ours. About 1.8 million years ago, they were the first humans to know winter.
Ongoing excavations at Dmanisi, a site in the Republic of Georgia, have yielded scores of early hominid fossils, including five skulls and, most recently, a complete male pelvis found in 2014. The fossils’ mix of primitive and more evolved characteristics — such as small brains but body proportions similar to our own — defies how we currently classify our distant ancestors and relatives. An equally compelling mystery, however, is what the hominids were doing at Dmanisi in the first place.
Dmanisi’s hominid fossils, the oldest outside Africa, have been excavated with more than 10,000 bones from about 50 other extinct species, including deer, bears and saber-toothed tigers. The trove of fossils hints at the rich biodiversity of the site, which is hundreds of miles north — and more than a thousand miles away — from any other hominid activity during the Gelasian Pleistocene, 1.8 million to 2.5 million years ago. Hominids, specifically the fairly advanced Homo erectus, began to disperse from Africa only at the tail end of that period, according to the current timeline of human evolution.
Perhaps it’s time to rewrite that chronology
