Direct radiocarbon dates for Vindija G(1) and Velika Pecína late Pleistocene hominid remains.

New accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon dates taken directly on human remains from the Late Pleistocene sites of Vindija and Velika Pecina in the Hrvatsko Zagorje of Croatia are presented. Hominid specimens from both sites have played critical roles in the development of current perspectives on modern human evolutionary emergence in Europe. Dates of approximately 28 thousand years (ka) before the present (B.P.) and approximately 29 ka B.P. for two specimens from Vindija G(1) establish them as the most recent dated Neandertals in the Eurasian range of these archaic humans. The human frontal bone from Velika Pecina, generally considered one of the earliest representatives of modern humans in Europe, dated to approximately 5 ka B.P., rendering it no longer pertinent to discussions of modern human origins. Apart from invalidating the only radiometrically based example of temporal overlap between late Neandertal and early modern human fossil remains from within any region of Europe, these dates raise the question of when early modern humans first dispersed into Europe and have implications for the nature and geographic patterning of biological and cultural interactions between these populations and the Neandertals.