A land bridge across the Aegean

How did hominids first reach Europe? Both the early homo sapiens and their nearderthaler cousins?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/10/251011105529.htm

The simple answer is "by walking -- that is, by simple ground based migration". We don't have to get fancy here. If homo sapiens originated in eastern Africa as is now generally presumed, anyplace else in the vast Africa OR Eurasian land masses could have been reached by enough walking over time.

But archeologists want to be more specific. And as the story on the other side of the above link indicates, there is news here. We don't have to presume that the original discoverers of Europe passed just north or just south of the Black Sea. Instead, they could have come across a land bridge that existed right through the middle of the Aegean between 1 million and 400,000 years ago.

A simple matter for specialists, you say? Yes, but I enjoy the fact of curiosity about the discovery of Europe, undermining the traditional use of the word "discovery" to mean the asymmetrical "the first European to see X".

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