Today, we’re journeying to southern Greece, where researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery deep within an open coal mine. This site, dating back an astonishing 700,000 years, is now considered the oldest archaeological site in Greece, offering invaluable insights into the lives of our hominin ancestors.
This discovery pushes back the dawn of Greek archaeology by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest, in Spain, dates back more than a million years.
The Greek site was one of five investigated in the Megalopolis area during a five-year project involving an international team of experts. The site was found to contain rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period, about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago, and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and a macaque monkey.
The artifacts are “simple tools, like sharp stone flakes, belonging to the Lower Paleolithic stone tool industry,” according to the project co-directors. It’s possible that these items were produced by Homo antecessor, the hominin species dating from that period in other parts of Europe. Homo antecessor is believed to have been the last common ancestor of modern humans and their extinct Neanderthal cousins, who diverged about 800,000 years ago.
The tools, likely used for butchering animals and processing wood or other plant matter, were made about 700,000 years ago. The researchers are awaiting further analyses to refine the dating.
This discovery is not just significant because it represents Greece’s oldest known site, but also because of the archaeological context in which the tools and animal remains were found. It allows us to move far back in time and understand the age of the first tools in Greece in an authoritative manner.
Another of the sites investigated in the Megalopolis area of the southern Peloponnese peninsula contained the oldest Middle Palaeolithic remains found in Greece, dating to roughly 280,000 years ago.
This discovery underscores the great importance of our region for understanding hominin migrations to Europe and for human evolution in general. It also suggests that Greece may have played a significant role in stone industry developments in Europe.
“Greece: Oldest site in country found in coal mine.” AP News. https://apnews.com/article/greece-archaeology-oldest-site-stone-tools-3e84007cde4d77a2725b7877b9b38335
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