The Myth of a Single Origin: How Two Worlds Shaped the Dawn of Modern Toolmaking

A Tale of Two Beginnings

For more than half a century, the story of Homo sapiens’ expansion into Europe has rested on a tidy narrative: a wave of modern humans, armed with Levantine ingenuity, pushed westward out of the Near East roughly 45,000 years ago. Their tools, refined and elegant, heralded the so-called Protoaurignacian culture—Europe’s earliest trace of our species.

Examples of stone tools from the Ahmarian at Ksar Akil (a & b) and the Protoaurignacian at Grotta di Fumane (c) and Grotta di Castelcivita (d). Falcucci and Kuhn found that, despite similarities in the final forms, the technological processes used to produce these tools were strikingly different. Credit: Panels a and b are from the University of Tübingen’s stone tool collections; panel c is adapted from Falcucci et al. (2022) and panel d from Falcucci et al. (2024).

But tidy stories rarely survive the messiness of the archaeological record. A new study¹ by Armando Falcucci of the University of Tübingen and Steven Kuhn of the University of Arizona argues that Europe’s first Upper Paleolithic toolmakers didn’t simply inherit their know-how from Levantine ancestors. Instead, the evidence points to something far more interesting: two populations of Homo sapiens—one in the Near East, another in southern Europe—arriving at similar technological solutions on their own.

“Cultural convergence is not imitation—it’s parallel invention under similar pressures,” explains Dr. Elena Rossi, a paleoarchaeologist at Cambridge University. “What Falcucci and Kuhn show is that human ingenuity did not radiate from a single hub but flickered independently across continents.”