Greek researchers discover oldest archaeological site

Researchers in southern Greece have discovered the oldest archaeological site in the antiquities-rich nation, which dates back to 700,000 years ago and is associated with modern humans hominin ancestors.

The discovery also announced Thursday will drag the start of Greek archaeology back by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest building in Spain dates to more than a million years ago.

The Greek site is one of five investigated in the area of megalopolis during a five-year project involving an international team of experts, the Ministry of Culture 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.

The project was led by Panagiotis Karkanas of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Eleni Panagopoulou from the Greek Culture Ministry and Katerina Harvati, professor of paleoanthropology at the University of T bingen in Germany.

The artifacts, which are simple tools, like sharp stone flakes, belonging to the Lower Paleolithic stone tool industry, the co-directors said in comments e-mail to The Associated Press.

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.

But the research team said it will not be able to be sure until hominin fossil remains are recovered. The site is the oldest known hominin presence in Greece, and it pushes back the oldest archaeological record of the country by up to 250,000 years. The tools, that were likely used for butchering animals and processing wood or other plant matter, were made about 700,000 years ago, the researchers said, though 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 co-directors said.

The archaeologist Nikos Efstratiou, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece, said the discovery was very important in itself not just because it represented the country's oldest known site.

The archaeological context in which tools, and remains of animals have been found, Efstratiou said. It is an important and very early site that allows us to move far back and in an authoritative way, the age of the first tools in Greece. Another of the sites investigated in the area of the southern Peloponnese peninsula, known for the enormously later sites of Mycenae, Olympia and Pylos, contained the oldest Middle Palaeolithic remains found in Greece, dating to roughly 280,000 years ago.

It is one of the oldest sites in Europe that have tools characteristic of the so-called Middle Palaeolithic tool industry, which the researchers said may have played a significant role in stone industry developments in Europe.

For decades, a coal mine in the megalopolis plain has been mined to supply a local power plant. The basin contained a shallow lake during palaeolithic times.

Ancient times have been a site of fossils, and in ancient times giant prehistoric bones dug up there were linked to the Greek myths of a long-vanished race of giants that fought the gods of Olympus. Some ancient writers cited Megalopolis as the site of a significant battle in that supernatural war.