Reconstruction
Dmanisi sits on a promontory in southern Georgia where two rivers meet, and its deposits, dated to between 1.85 and 1.78 million years ago, hold the earliest well-dated hominin fossils in Eurasia and the oldest undisputed hominin remains anywhere outside Africa. For food history the site poses a question sharper than most: what happens when a forager arrives somewhere it has no evolutionary experience of eating? The answer is legible in the faunal record. Roughly 17,000 animal bones have been analysed, and every identified species is Eurasian rather than African. Whatever dietary knowledge these hominins carried out of Africa, the animals they had learned to process were no longer available. They were working an entirely unfamiliar set of species, in a temperate landscape with real seasons rather than a tropical one, and they succeeded well enough to leave a substantial and repeated occupation. Cut marks on bone establish that stone tools were used on carcasses across a wide size range, from small mammals up to Mammuthus meridionalis, an extinct southern mammoth. That places Dmanisi among the oldest proposed elephant butchery sites anywhere, though as with all butchery evidence the marks show processing rather than killing, and a mammoth found dead is a windfall no forager would decline. Use-wear on other tools indicates cutting plant material, so the toolkit was applied to more than meat and the diet was mixed. The technology involved was not advanced. The Dmanisi assemblage is Oldowan, the same cores and flakes in use across Africa, with no innovation to explain the expansion. There was no controlled fire. And the hominins themselves were unimpressive by later standards: small-brained, small-bodied, and in one celebrated case an individual who had lost nearly all their teeth and survived a long time afterwards. That last detail has invited speculation about food being processed or shared for someone who could not chew, which is plausible but not demonstrated. What crossed into Eurasia, then, was not a superior body or a better toolkit. It was behavioural flexibility, the same willingness to treat unfamiliar things as edible that shows up in australopithecine tooth chemistry two million years earlier and in the turtles and fish at Koobi Fora. Their taxonomy remains unsettled, proposed as Homo georgicus in 2002 and reassigned to Homo erectus georgicus in 2006, with the argument continuing. The dispersal itself is the point for a food record: hominin diet stopped being a property of one continent's ecology, and began adapting to whatever a new landscape offered.
Historical context
Between 1.85 and 1.78 million years ago, hominins were leaving Africa for the first known time while Homo erectus, Homo habilis and Paranthropus boisei still occupied eastern Africa. Fire was not in controlled use anywhere. The Dmanisi landscape was temperate woodland and steppe at the meeting of two rivers, with genuine winters, inhabited by southern mammoth, rhinoceros, giant short-faced cheetah, sabre-toothed cats and an early hunting dog. Oldowan technology was the only stone industry in existence. The Caucasus lay on the route between Africa and the Eurasian interior.
Evidence
Archaeological
StrongHominin fossils, Oldowan artefacts and a large faunal assemblage are recovered from stratified deposits and extensively published.
Dating
StrongCombined magnetostratigraphy, argon dating and biostratigraphy constrain the occupations to 1.85-1.78 million years, making these the earliest well-dated hominin fossils in Eurasia.
Zooarchaeological
ModerateCut marks on bone across a wide size range evidence tool use on carcasses. Approximately 17,000 bones are analysed and all identified species are Eurasian.
Food identification
ModerateTaxa including Mammuthus meridionalis are identified. Use-wear indicating plant cutting supports a mixed diet, though specific plant foods are not identified.
LimitedTaxonomic assignment of the hominins is unsettled, proposed as Homo georgicus in 2002 and revised to Homo erectus georgicus in 2006, with debate continuing.
Historical interpretation
InterpretiveWhether the mammoth was hunted or scavenged is not resolved by cut marks. The suggestion that food was processed or shared for the near-toothless individual is plausible but not demonstrated.
Sources
- 1.Reid Ferring, Oriol Oms, Jordi Agustí, et al. (2011). Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85-1.78 Ma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(26), 10432-10436. doi:10.1073/pnas.1106638108Scientific literature
- 2.Saverio Bartolini-Lucenti, Joan Madurell-Malapeira, Bienvenido Martínez-Navarro and colleagues (2021). The early hunting dog from Dmanisi with comments on the social behaviour in Canidae and hominins. Scientific Reports 11. www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92818-4Scientific literature
Limitations
- moderatehistorical interpretation
Cut marks on Mammuthus meridionalis show processing, not killing. Describing Dmanisi as evidence of mammoth hunting would overstate it; a dead mammoth is a windfall that requires no hunting capability.
- minorfood identification
Plant use rests on tool use-wear rather than on preserved plant remains, so the diet is known to have included plant material without any specific plant food being identified.
- minorarchaeological attribution
The taxonomy of the Dmanisi hominins is unsettled: proposed as Homo georgicus in 2002, reassigned to Homo erectus georgicus in 2006, and still debated. Any single species label on this card carries that uncertainty.
