About 90 kilometres southwest of Tbilisi, on a rocky promontory above two rivers, stand the ruins of Dmanisi, a medieval town on the old Silk Road. In 1991, while excavating it, archaeologists noticed something much older beneath the medieval layers: bones of extinct animals, and stone tools.
What came next changed the textbooks.
The skulls
Over the following years, the team uncovered the remains of early humans: five skulls in total, along with jaws and other bones. Two of the first, near-complete skulls were given Georgian names: Zezva and Mzia.
They are about 1.8 million years old. That makes the people of Dmanisi the oldest human fossils ever found outside Africa.
In 2005 the team found a fifth skull, published in 2013 in the journal Science. It is the most complete adult skull of an early human from that period found anywhere in the world.
Why Dmanisi matters
Before Dmanisi, many scientists believed early humans left Africa only after they had evolved large brains and advanced tools. The Dmanisi people did not fit that picture. Their brains were small, and their stone tools were simple. Yet they had already travelled thousands of kilometres from Africa to the Caucasus.
The five skulls also look surprisingly different from each other, even though they lived in the same place at roughly the same time. This led researchers to a bold idea: several early human “species” known only from single fossils in Africa might actually have been one species with a lot of natural variation, just as people differ today. That debate is still going on.
Today the Dmanisi people are generally classified as an early form of Homo erectus. They were once given their own name, Homo georgicus.
Who they were, and who they were not
It is important to be precise. Zezva and Mzia were not Georgians, and not the ancestors of today’s Georgians. They were an early human species that lived here almost two million years before modern humans existed.
What Dmanisi does tell us is that this land has one of the longest human stories on Earth. The first people to step out of Africa found something here they needed: water, animals to hunt, and shelter. Long before kingdoms, alphabets or wine, there were people in these valleys.
Visiting Dmanisi
The site is open to visitors, with a small museum and a protected excavation area where work continues each summer. Finds from Dmanisi are also shown at the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.