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Excavations in Bulgaria’s Bacho Kiro Cave unearthed the oldest directly dated remains of Homo sapiens in what’s now Europe.


"Three Initial Upper Paleolithic individuals (c. 44,000 to 40,000 years ago) from Bacho Kiro cave were each found to have relatively high levels of Neanderthal ancestry, with their genomes suggesting a recent Neanderthal ancestor in all three individuals perhaps six or seven generations back.

In the single dispersal Out of Africa theory, it is believed that populations related to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic population of Bacho Kiro cave contributed ancestry to later Asian populations and early West Europeans such as the c. 35,000 year old individual from the Goyet Caves, Belgium."