1.8 million-year-old human jawbone discovered in Republic of Georgia — and it may be earliest evidence yet of Homo erectus

Two hominin molars peek out of a mass of bone embedded in orange-brown dirt.

A roughly 1.8 million-year-old Homo erectus jawbone discovered in the Republic of Georgia may be evidence of one of the earliest human groups to live outside Africa.

The discovery, announced July 31 by the Georgian National Agency for Cultural Heritage Preservation, sheds new light on the evolution of our genus, Homo, and "is expected to reveal the reasons for the migration of early hominins out of Africa," Giorgi Bidzinashvili, an archaeologist at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, told Live Science in an email.