Cele mai vechi urme de hominid din Europa sunt cele descoperite în Oltenia? #IstoriiAscunse @TVRTM

In January 2025, the journal Nature Communications published a study signed by over fifteen researchers from Romania and around the world. For several days, the international scientific press wrote about a single place: Valea lui Grăunceanu, Tetoiu commune, Vâlcea county. A place known until then only to specialists. The study demonstrated that, almost two million years ago, a hominid had left traces in this valley. The oldest of this kind discovered so far in Europe. The fossils that had aroused so much interest had been collected from the soil of the valley located in southern Romania, in the 1960s and kept since then in collections in Bucharest and Craiova. An international team re-examined them and, as a result of the research, discovered what no one had noticed for 60 years. Sabrina Curran, a researcher at Ohio University, is the one who noticed the traces. He had previously worked in Dmanisi, Georgia, and knew exactly what a stone tool cut looked like on the surface of a fossil. The site from which the fossils had been taken was already extremely well-known in the paleontological world.