Dmanisi

Dmanisi occupies the Mashavera valley in Georgia’s Kvemo Kartli region, about 93 kilometres southwest of Tbilisi. The area was settled from at least the Early Bronze Age, and a sixth-century Orthodox cathedral known as Dmanisi Sioni stood there. By the ninth century, the town appeared in written records as a possession of the Arab emirate of Tbilisi. Its place where trading routes and cultural influences converged helped it grow into a major commercial centre of medieval Georgia. Seljuk forces took the town in the 1080s, and Georgian kings David the Builder and Demetrios I recovered it between 1123 and 1125.

Turco-Mongol armies under Timur devastated Dmanisi in the fourteenth century. A further sack by Turkmen forces in 1486 prevented recovery, and by the eighteenth century it had declined to a scarcely inhabited village; the castle later belonged to the House of Orbeliani. Beneath these medieval ruins lies a much older record. Hominin remains found at Dmanisi and dated to about 1.8 million years ago are among the earliest discovered outside Africa. Stone tools found there prompted wider excavation, and the skulls recovered in later seasons led to debate over whether fossils once assigned to separate species represented a single evolving lineage.