Dmanisi

Dmanisi is one of the most important sites in the world for the story of human evolution. On a promontory above the Mashavera and Pinezauri rivers, beneath the ruins of a medieval town, archaeologists have found five early human skulls and other fossils dated to between 1.85 and 1.77 million years ago, among the oldest human remains known outside Africa. They showed that early humans left Africa earlier than once thought. Today the site is a museum-reserve run by the Georgian National Museum, where you can walk the medieval town and see the excavation area.

The medieval town is impressive in its own right. Fortifications, churches, cemeteries, workshops and bathhouses spread over about 13 hectares, with a suburb beyond, and a citadel with a palace on the southern tip. The Dmanisi Sioni cathedral, an early medieval basilica with a 13th-century narthex, still stands at the heart of the site. The site museum displays more than 2,300 finds and opens seasonally, roughly May to October. Some of the hominin fossils are shown at the National Museum in Tbilisi.

Dmanisi is first recorded in the 9th century as a possession of the Arab emirate of Tbilisi. Seljuk Turks took it in the 1080s, and the Georgian kings David the Builder and Demetre I recovered it in 1123–1125. It prospered in the 12th and 13th centuries, was laid waste by Timur in the 14th, and was sacked by the Turkomans in 1486, after which it never recovered. Excavations of the medieval town uncovered a hominin jaw in 1991, and the skulls followed between 1999 and 2005.