Prehistoric Greece: Early Evidence of Hominins, Humans and Agriculture | Early European History And Religion

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EARLY EVIDENCE OF HUMANS IN GREECE

Among the earliest evidence of modern humans in Europe dates to 45,000 years ago and is from Mount Parnassus, Greece. Geneticist Bryan Sykes identifies 'Ursula' as the first of The Seven Daughters of Eve, and the carrier of the mitochondrial haplogroup U. This hypothetical woman moved between the mountain caves and the coast of Greece, and based on genetic research represent the first human settlement of Europe.

Archaic Homo sapiens is term used to describe hominins viewed as transitions between Homo erectus and modern man, and possibly Neanderthals too. These creatures came on the scene when big browed, jutting jaw hominins were still around. Homo sapien means "Wise Man." Among the most complete skulls ever found was one found in 1960 in Petralona, Greece by Greek villagers. It is housed in Paleontological Museum, University of Thessaloniki. [Source: Kenneth Weaver, National Geographic, November 1985]

n October 2004, team of European and Israeli archaeologists announced unearthed the oldest known clay fireplaces made by humans at a dig in southern Greece. The hearths, excavated from the Klisoura Cave, in the northwest Peloponnesus, are at least 23,000 to 34,000 years old and were probably used for cooking by prehistoric residents of the area, according to the archaeology journal Antiquity. The study said that remnants of wood ash and plant cells had also been found in the hearths. The discovery, experts say, helps explain the transition from the oldest known hearths, made of stone, to clay structures like the ones at Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic. [Source: Anthee Carassava, New York Times]

700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Found in Greece

In June 2023, the Greek Culture Ministry announced that stone tools and animal fossils dated about 700,000 years ago had been found on the sides of an open coal mine in Megalopolis, southern Greece, the oldest-known archaeological site in the country, pushing back the time when the first known hominins lived there by up to 250,000 years, Associated Press reported: The Greek site was one of five investigated in the Megalopolis area during a five-year project involving an international team of experts, a Culture Ministry statement said. It 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. It's not clear which ancient hominin used the site, but researchers suspect it was archaic modern humans (Homo sapiens). [Source: Nicholas Paphitis, Associated Press, June 2, 2023]

The project was directed by Panagiotis Karkanas of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Eleni Panagopoulou from the Greek Culture Ministry and Katerina Harvati, a professor of paleoanthropology at the University of Tübingen in Germany. The artifacts are “simple tools, like sharp stone flakes, belonging to the Lower Paleolithic stone tool industry,” the co-directors said. They said it's possible the 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. “However, we will not be able to be sure until hominin fossil remains are recovered,” the project directorss 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.”

The tools, which were likely used for butchering animals and processing wood or other plant matter, were made about 700,000 years ago, though the researchers said they were awaiting further analyses to refine the dating. “We are very excited to be able to report this finding, which demonstrates the great importance of our region for understanding hominin migrations to Europe and for human evolution in general,” the three co-directors said.

130,000-Year-Old Axes in Crete

Hand axes found on Crete suggest hominids made sea crossings to go 'out of Africa' Bruce Bower wrote in Science News: “ Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island. [Source: Bruce Bower, Science News, January 11, 2010 +]

“Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. It was around that time that H. erectus spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe. +\

“Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories hold that early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time. "We're just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place," Strasser says. Other researchers have controversially suggested that H. erectus navigated rafts across short stretches of sea in Indonesia around 800,000 years ago and that Neandertals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar perhaps 60,000 years ago. +\

Modern Humans in Greece 210,000 Years Ago?

In 2019, a modern human skull found in Greece was dated to be 210,000 years — a stunning date making it by far the s the oldest Homo sapiens fossil found in Europe and outside Africa. Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic: In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be Neanderthals, or perhaps another ancient hominin. And since they were entombed together, in a block of stone no bigger than a microwave, “it was always assumed that they were the same [species] and came from the same time period,” says Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. [Source: Ed Yong, The Atlantic, July 10, 2019]

“That’s wrong. By thoroughly analyzing both skulls using modern techniques, Harvati and her colleagues have shown that they are very different, in both age and identity. “The one with the face, known as Apidima 2, is a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal — no surprises there. But the other, Apidima 1, was one of us — a 210,000-year-old modern human. And if the team is right about that, the partial skull is the oldest specimen of Homo sapiens outside Africa, handily beating the previous record holder, a jawbone from Israel’s Misliya Cave that’s about 180,000 years old. “I couldn’t believe it at first,” Harvati says, “but all the analyses we conducted gave the same result.”

“Until now, most researchers have focused on the more complete (but less interesting) of the two skulls. “Apidima 1 has just been ignored,” says Harvati. But its antiquity matters for three reasons. First, it pushes back the known presence of modern humans outside Africa by some 30,000 years. Second, it’s considerably older than all other Homo sapiens fossils from Europe... Third, it’s older than the Neanderthal skull next to it.

Spread of Agriculture to Greece

Wheat and barley agriculture spread out of Fertile crescent by 7000 B.C. By 6000 B.C., it had gotten as far as the Black Sea and present day Greece and Italy. Farming villages in western Greece date to about 7000 B.C.. By 5000 B.C. it had spread to most of southern Europe. The Linear Pottery Culture of central Hungary is believed to have introduced agriculture to central Europe around 5000 B.C. Agriculture finally reached southern Britain and Scandinavia around 3800 B.C. and north Britain and central Scandinavia by 2,500 B.C.

Frank Jordans of Associated Press wrote: “Stone Age people from the Aegean Sea region moved into central and southern Europe some 8,000 years ago and introduced agriculture to a continent still dominated at the time by hunter-gatherers, scientists say. The findings are based on genetic samples from ancient farming communities in Germany, Hungary and Spain. By comparing these with ancient genomes found at sites in Greece and northwest Turkey, where agriculture was practiced centuries earlier, researchers were able to draw a genetic line linking the European and Aegean populations.” [Source: Frank Jordans, Associated Press June 7, 2016]

Joachim Burger, one of the study's authors, said genetic analyses of the samples of farmers from Spain, Germany and Greece showed that the ancient farmers in central Europe and Spain were more closely related to an earlier Aegean group than to each other. This suggests that farmers came in two separate waves — northward into the continent and westward along the coastline to Spain. "One is the Balkan route and one is the Mediterranean route, as we know it also from migration of today," Burger, an anthropologist and population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, told Associated Press. [Source :Frank Jordans, Associated Press, June 7, 2016]

DNA Evidence Regarding Early Greeks

When scientists compared the ancient DNA of Europe’s earliest farmers to that of modern-day Europeans, they found that the farmer’s DNA was most similar to Mediterranean populations like Cypriots and Greeks. In contrast, the hunter-gatherer DNA most closely resembled northerners like Finns. The simplest explanation for this pattern is that an ancient migration of farmers started in southern Europe and moved northward over many generations, said the researchers, from Uppsala University in Sweden and other institutions in Sweden and Denmark. .”[Source:University of Wisconsin, Madison, February 11, 2013]

Fertile Crescent cultures diverged and took farming east and west based on DNA taken from bone fragment from a 7,000-year-old farmer discovered in a cave in the Zagros region of Iran and the DNA of three other individuals from a second Iranian site. According to Science News: “Sometime after farming was developed, the two cultures began to move apart. Why they spread so differently is still a mystery. More DNA samples from ancient people east of the Fertile Crescent are necessary to confirm that people spread from Iran eastward, says anthropologist Christina Papageorgopoulou of the Democritus University of Thrace in Greece. She coauthored the Anatolian study but was not involved in the new work. [Source: Amy McDermott, sciencenews.org, July 14, 2016 ||-||]

Some think agriculture was carried westward from the Near East suddenly and dramatically in early ships. Remains of boats found in Sardinia and Crete show that men have been crossing seas for more than 10,000 years. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in June 2016 that supports the idea that at least some migrants came by sea and challenges the notion that farming simply spread from one population to another through cultural diffusion.

Early European Farmers — in Greece

According to Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz: In June 2016, an international research team led by paleogeneticists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) published a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that early farmers from across Europe have an almost unbroken trail of ancestry leading back to the Aegean. The scientists analyzed the DNA of early farmer skeletons from Greece and Turkey. According to the study, the Neolithic settlers from northern Greece and the Marmara Sea region of western Turkey reached central Europe via a Balkan route and the Iberian Peninsula via a Mediterranean route. These colonists brought sedentary life, agriculture, and domestic animals and plants to Europe. During their expansion they will have met hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe since the Ice Age, but the two groups mixed initially only to a very limited extent. "They exchanged cultural heritage and knowledge, but rarely spouses," commented anthropologist Joachim Burger, who lead the research. "Only after centuries did the number of partnerships increase." [Source: Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz, June 6, 2016 =|=]

“Professor Joachim Burger, his Mainz paleogeneticist team, and international collaborators have pioneered paleogenetic research of the Neolithization process in Europe over the last seven years. They showed a lack of interbreeding between farmers and hunter-gatherers in prehistoric Europe in 2009 and 2013 (Bramanti et al. 2009; Bollongino et al. 2013). Now, they demonstrate that the cultural and genetic differences were the result of separate geographical origins. "The migrating farmers did not only bring a completely foreign culture, but looked different and spoke a different language," stated Christina Papageorgopoulou from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece,, who initiated the study as a Humboldt Fellow in Mainz together with Joachim Burger.=|=

“The study used genomic analysis to clarify a long-standing debate about the origins of the first European farmers by showing that the ancestry of Central and Southwestern Europeans can be traced directly back to Greece and northwestern Anatolia. "There are still details to flesh out, and no doubt there will be surprises around the corner, but when it comes to the big picture on how farming spread into Europe, this debate is over," said Mark Thomas of University College London (UCL), co-author on the study. "Thanks to ancient DNA, our understanding of the Neolithic revolution has fundamentally changed over the last seven years." =|=

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2024