Ancient Greek History Rewritten by a Quarter Million Years

In June 2023, an archaeological find in the Peloponnese rewrote ancient Greek history, in one of the most sensational discoveries of the decade.

Stone tools dating back to the Lower Palaeolithic period, estimated to be around 3.3 million to 300,000 years old, were discovered deep in an open coal mine in the Megalopolis area.

This find significantly pushed back the timeline of human presence in Greece, challenging the prevailing understanding of the region’s early civilizations.

The Greek site was one of five investigated in the Megalopolis area during a five-year project involving an international team of experts.

It contained rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and a macaque monkey.

According to a statement by the Greek Ministry of Culture  the site “offers a unique opportunity to investigate human behavior over time, for an important period in the history of human evolution and in an area that has so far been little investigated.”

The discovery makes Ancient Greek history part of human evolution

The Megalopolis Basin in the Peloponnese was among the southernmost ecological refuges in Europe during the glacial periods of the Middle Pleistocene, according to the results of a five-year program of surface and geoarchaeological research recently completed by the Culture Ministry and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA).

The project was directed by Panagiotis Karkanas of ASCSA, Eleni Panagopoulou from the Greek Culture Ministry and Katerina Harvati, a professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

“With this discovery, we put Greece in the game of human evolution and the colonization of Europe by hominids, something Greece was not associated with until recently,” said Panagiotis Karkanas.

The artifacts are “simple tools, like sharp stone flakes, belonging to the Lower Paleolithic stone tool industry,” the co-directors told the Associated Press.

They said it’s possible the items were produced by Homo ancestor, 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.

“However, we will not be able to be sure until hominin fossil remains are recovered,” the project directors said. “(The site) is the oldest currently known hominin presence in Greece, and it pushes back the known archaeological record in the country by up to 250,000 years.”

Related: The Prehistoric ‘Human Skull’ Cave of Greece