The oldest hominid site outside Africa — 1.8 million years old, in a ruined medieval Georgian city above a river confluence
Dmanisi is an extraordinary layered site in the Kvemo Kartli region of southern Georgia, 90km southwest of Tbilisi, where a medieval Georgian city (abandoned in the 17th century) sits directly above one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in human evolutionary history: the remains of early Homo (assigned to Homo erectus georgicus or Homo ergaster) dated to approximately 1.77–1.85 million years ago — the oldest hominid fossils ever found outside Africa, rewriting the timeline of human migration out of the continent. Five skulls and associated postcranial material have been excav…
Dmanisi's medieval city was founded in the 6th century CE as an early Christian settlement, developed into a major regional trading center under the Georgian kingdom in the 11th–12th centuries (with documented Arab, Armenian, Jewish, and Georgian communities), and was destroyed by Timur in 1386, then briefly recovered before being permanently abandoned following another Mongol-Timurid raid in 1486. The site was used for seasonal grazing thereafter. The Dmanisi hominid discoveries, beginning with a jaw in 1991 and continuing through 2005, have fundamentally altered paleoanthropological underst…