After my recent post on Homo georgicus and the Dmanisi site in Georgia, eastern Europe. I read about other sites in the area, and learned that in the Georgian village of Orozmani, roughly 13 km (8 miles) from Dmainsi, two remarkable discoveries had been made: in 2021 a tooth was found, and in July of 2025, a 1.8-million-year-old jawbone was dug up, it belongs to Homo erectus. (Source.)
The map above gives some perspective. The distance, in a straight line, from the closest point of Africa to Dmanisi (Suez Canal), and the site in Dmanisi is 1,600 km, or 1,000 miles. These people moved all the way from the alleged cradle of mankind in Turkana, Kenya, and Olduvai in Tanzania, to Sinai to bridge the Red Sea (2,900 km - 1,800 mi.) and then enter an unknown territory to trek another 1,600 km - 1,000 miles north into the Caucasus Region.
Implications
In what is now Georgia (Dmanisi and Kvemo Orozmani) these hominins could have evolved becoming H. erectus. Erectus later moved west deeper into Asia (where we find them in Indonesia and China), and being the top hominins of their era, they also surely back-migrated into Africa, where they evolved into H. heidelbergensis / rhodesiensis, from which our Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestors arose, leaving Africa for a second time. Those remaining in Africa evolved into archaic African sapiens ancestors. Perhaps, at the same time, the Asian erectus in the Far Eastern parts of Asia evolved into the archaic sapiens that the Chinese have been uncovering there.
The Papers on the Orozmani site
There is only one paper on this site and most of the information comes from the media reporting the findings. Apparently an international team of reasearchers from different European countries have been digging here since 2021. That year stone tools and the bones of animals hade been discovered and dated to a similar age to the nearby Dmanisi site (1.77 to 1.84 million years). The tooth has not yet been associated with any hominin. The jawbone from the summer of 2025 seems to belong to a H. erectus. See this media news release.
The only reference I have found (Google Scholar and combing the Internet) is this one:
Bidzinashvili, G., Chagelashvili, R., Coil, R., Kopaliani, G., Martkoplishvili, I., & Vanishvili, N. (2023). Kvemo Orozmani, Georgia: a new Lower Paleolithic archaeological site in the Southern Caucasus. Paper presented at Paleoanthropology Society Meetings, Portland, Oregon, United States.
Its abstract is the given below. Note that this paper dates back to March 2023, and is reporting the first findings, not the jawbone.
"The Southern Caucasus represent one of the hubs for the earliest range expansions of hominins during the Early Pleistocene, as evidenced by the extensive archaeological site at Dmanisi, Georgia. Here, we present findings from a new Lower Paleolithic archaeological site in Georgia: Kvemo Orozmani, which is located approximately twenty kilometers west of Dmanisi. Previous dating and analyses of phytoliths and sedimentology correlated the Kvemo Orozmani and nearby Zemo Orozmani sequences to the Dmanisi stratigraphy, indicating roughly contemporaneous localities (Messager et al., 2011). A recent revisit to the Kvemo Orozmani profile revealed Oldowan-like stone artifacts along with faunal remains. Subsequent excavations began in 2020 and have produced more lithic artifacts, faunal remains from numerous carnivores and ungulates, and a hominin tooth. The latter find doubles the number of hominin-bearing Early Pleistocene localities in the Southern Caucasus and offers potential insights into the hominin populations who expanded into this region. Here, we present our initial findings on site formation, archaeology, taphonomy, and paleontology and how this site fits into the greater context of the earliest hominin expansions into Eurasia."
Interestingly it mentions "Oldowan-like stone artifacts" which are pre-Homo erectus, the erectus people developed the Acheulean lithic techology, Oldowan is associated with H. habilis, though a recent study published this year suggest that another group of hominins, the Paranthropus boisei, could have used Oldowan techniques around 2.8 million years ago.
Another online link in Research Gate is the following (Kvemo Orozmani, Georgia: a new Lower Paleolithic archaeological site in the Southern Caucasus): A pdf with images, maps and little text. It has the same title, but seems like a presentation of the paper, not the paper itself. It includes the tooth, coprolites, and the tools. The following map is from this pdf.
It also includes images of their stone tools, which look very primitive, almost geofacts. Clearly Oldowan and not the Acehulean tools of H. erectus. As mentioned further up, Oldowan means primitive hominins, like H. habilis, Paranthroupus and also, some australopithecus. The image below is from the same 2023 paper.
Now we will have to wait for the publication on this 2025 jaw discovery and for the identification of the hominin that provided the tooth.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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