Discovery: Prehistoric site in Greece pushes back oldest hominid presence in region by 250,000 years
Photo credit: Stone tools made by hominins, Choremi 7, Greece. (Image credit: Copyright YPPOA (Greek Culture Ministry))
"The Megalopolis basin (...) provides a crucial piece of the puzzle of human evolution in Europe!" These are the words that Katerina Harvati, paleoanthropologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany and co-project leader, confided to Live Science about this discovery. Indeed, after excavations carried out in the Megalopolis basin in Arcadia (Greece), in 2023, tools were revealed that would date back between 280,000 and 700,000 years. This pushes the oldest known presence of hominids in the region back to 250,000 years ago.
Located southwest of Athens, the basin of Megalopolis is full of fossils. However, it has not known a multitude of excavations. A team of archaeologists supported by the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens has set itself the task of unlocking its secrets, as part of a five-year excavation. What they found calls into question the information we previously had about the ancestor of human beings, in Greece.
In Greece, a site dating from around 280,000 years ago containing stone tools
Five new sites exposed by mining activity have given access to deeper areas, yielding older remains. The most recent, Choremi 7 , dating from about 280,000 years ago, contained stone tools, as well as deer bones with traces of cuts.
Photo credit: Copyright Ministry of Culture and Culture
Another area referenced as Tripotamos 4, 400,000 years old, contained more stone tools, as well as evidence of innovations in the method of working the material. According to a statement from the Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, this offers a better understanding of the technological developments of the Lower Paleolithic period (3.3 million to 300,000 years ago).
Photo credit: Copyright Ministry of Culture and Culture
Tools that (possibly) belonged to archaic Homo sapiens
It is not yet confirmed but according to certain hypotheses, these tools may have belonged to archaic Homo sapiens. These Middle Pleistocene hominids fall morphologically and behaviorally somewhere between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. The paleoanthropological community, for the most part, agrees that they are distinct species, one having a long and low skull, the other, rather a broader skull at the top of the parietals. Either way, he hunted hippos and elephants in present-day Greece, 250,000 years earlier than we thought.
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