Archaeologists who are working on a dig site in the country of Georgia have found a 1.8 million-year-old human jawbone.
The Orozmani Paleoanthropology & Archaeology Field School posted a video of the jawbone on its Instagram page in late July.
According to the Archaeology Institute of America, Orozmani is an “early Stone Age site” that is located “100 km south of the capital city of Tbilisi,” in the country of Georgia. That description comes from a field school posting on the site. The jawbone is from an “early species of human,” NBC News reported.
Experts Say the Orozmani Dig Site ‘Offers Insights’ Into Ancient Humans
Why Orozmani matters? The dig is helping flesh out scientists’ understanding of ancient humans in the Caucasus. Researchers are using artifacts at multiple dig sites in Georgia to better understand whether Anatomically Modern Humans interacted at all with Neanderthals. A new “chronology resurrects the discussion on the possible interactions between late Neanderthals and the early AMH populations in the region,” according to a 2025 research article in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Orozmani “offers insights into the presence of humans in the Caucasus around 1.8 million years ago,” the Archaeology Institute of America notes, adding, “The first extensive archaeological excavations started in 2019. Early Pleistocene fossils of extinct animals and stone tools were found.”
“The study of the early human and fossil animal remains from Orozmani will allow us to determine the lifestyle of the first colonizers of Eurasia,” said Giorgi Bidzinashvili, a professor of stone age archaeology at Ilia State University in Georgia, to NBC News, which confirmed the jawbone find.
“We think Orozmani can give us big information about humankind.”
NBC reported that the jawbone was found at the same site where a human tooth was previously discovered. The remains of a “saber-toothed tiger, elephant, wolf, deer and giraffe, as well as a cache of stone tools” were also located at Orozmani, according to NBC.
An excavation that started in 2021 resulted in the discovery of the “4th premolar tooth of a hominin mandible,” which “was found in the Lower Pleistocene layer,” the Institute says.
Other archaeological findings include:
- An H. erectus fossil.
- “Hundreds of prehistoric animal bones.”
- “Dozens of stone artifacts.”
“Further exploratory surveys in 2021-2022 revealed an extension of the fossil-rich sediments in each direction, indicating that the fossil deposits and archaeological site could be on the scale of thousands of square meter,” according to the Institute, which added that the site is close to the “most famous prehistoric site in Eurasia,” which is called “Dmanisi.”
The site is extremely important because of its proximity (20 km) to one of the most famous prehistoric site in Eurasia, “Dmanisi” which “boasts the earliest (1.8 million years) Hominin (H. erectus), remains outside of Africa.”
