Kozarnika, Dimovo Municipality

Worth a detour

The lowest layers here have been dated to around 1.4 million years, and they produced a hominin tooth and a handful of bones cut with deliberate-looking sequences of notches. If the dating holds, this is the earliest evidence of people in Europe, and it argues for a Balkan route out of Africa rather than the one by Gibraltar. Understand what you are coming to: an excavation with nothing laid on.

Story

Background

Kozarnika is a cave of about 210 metres in the rocks a couple of kilometres west-south-west of Gara Oreshets, off the road towards Belogradchik, reached by a steep path of a few hundred metres. Digging began in 1984, and since 1996 it has run as a joint Bulgarian–French project between the Archaeological Institute in Sofia and the Quaternary institute in Bordeaux, directed by Nikolay Sirakov and Jean-Luc Guadelli.

Two sets of finds matter. The upper ones are a late Palaeolithic industry of roughly the thirty-seventh to thirty-fourth millennium BC that looks nothing like its Bulgarian contemporaries at Bacho Kiro and Temnata Dupka, and much more like western European cultures of several thousand years later. The lower ones are the contested prize: the tooth, the incised bones, and a date of 1.4 million years. The marks on the bones have been read as intentional, which would push symbolic behaviour back by an order of magnitude — and the argument about them is not settled.

There is a third strand that gets less attention. The late Pleistocene layers held bird bones of forty-three species, including four that no longer live in Bulgaria — black grouse, willow ptarmigan, snowy owl and red-billed chough — in combinations that exist nowhere on earth today. Snowy owls and rock partridges shared this valley.