By: Nicholas Paphitis, Associated Press
ATHENS (AP).- High in the wind-swept mountain ridges of northern Greece, archaeologists have made a surprising discovery: hundreds of prehistoric stone tools that may have been used by some of the last Neanderthals in Europe, at a time when hunter-gatherers were thought to have kept to much lower altitudes. The two sites used between 50,000 to 35,000 years ago were found last summer in the Pindos Mountains, near the village of Samarina — one of Greece’s highest — some 400 kilometers (250 miles) northwest of Athens. At an altitude of more than 1,700 meters (5,500 feet), the Pindos Neanderthal sites are the highest known so far in southeastern Europe, although that’s probably because nobody thought of searching so high before, archaeologist Nikos Efstratiou said Wednesday. “It’s not that such sites don’t exist,” Efstratiou told The Associated Press. “For the first time, Greek archaeology has gone to the mountains.” Efstratiou and