The Petralona affaír
Locked in a vault at the University of Thessaloniki in northern Greece, shielded
from the controversies that surround it, lies one of the best-preserved Homo
heidelbergensis skulls ever found. When locals on the nearby Halkidiki Penin‐
sula uncovered it in Petralona Cave in 1960, it caused a stir. But few could have
foreseen how this key piece of the puzzle of Neanderthal origins would be the
focus of a decades-long legal dispute.
The protagonist of this tale is Aris Poulianos, whose career in Greece con‐
tains no academic appointments outside of the Anthropological Association of
Greece, an organization he founded and presided over for decades until he
handed it to his son, Nikos. From this base, he came to have complete control
over the excavation rights as well as tourist access to one of Europe’s most im‐
portant Palaeolithic sites. To understand how this came to be, we must delve
into the polarized political history of a country that still bears the scars of the
Second World War and a subsequent civil war between rival resistance factions.
According to the Anthropological Association’s website, Poulianos fought
with the communist resistance to Nazi occupation. After the war, he attained a
PhD on ‘The Origins of the Greeks’ in Moscow before he returned to Greece in
1965 in the hope of studying the Petralona skull. He soon entered the civil ser‐
vice as a scientific adviser. In 1968, using his position as vice-president of the
Greek Speleological Association, he began digging in Petralona. The Archaeo‐
logical Service soon put a halt to the project, however, and Poulianos was ex‐
pelled from the Speleological Association.
Cast of the skull found at Petralona Cave on the Halkidiki Peninsula in Greece. (Natur al History Museum,
London)
The reversal of fortune that handed the site back to Poulianos was a conse‐
quence of the reaction to the right-wing military junta that had ruled Greece
from 1967 to 1974. The junta was notorious for its repression of academic free‐
dom, and Poulianos, who had been imprisoned in the early days of the regime,
could portray himself as a scholar oppressed for his political views. In 1974 the
newly restored democratic government granted him an excavation permit for
Petralona, and in 1979 he signed an agreement with the Greek National
Tourism Organization to conduct further excavations and develop the site as a
tourist attraction. In 1983, under a left-wing government, the Greek state ex‐
pelled Poulianos from Petralona a second time, and he turned to the courts. The
government alleged that Poulianos was not excavating in a scientific manner
and was destroying the site.
Poulianos has sought to portray the skull and the site in superlative terms.
First, he insisted that the skull is the oldest in Europe. In a paper in 1971, he
dated it to 70,000 years ago, which he claimed made it the oldest known at the
time. In 1981 he added a zero to the date, making it 700,000 years old, main‐
taining its most ancient status in the light of more recent discoveries. Poulianos
retrospectively changed the stratigraphy of the find, moving it down from
Layer 10 (as he said in 1971) to Layer 11, a level he originally claimed was
empty of any human remains or artifacts.
Scientific dating techniques now place the skull between 160,000 and
620,000 years old, and the prevailing view is that the true date lies close to the
midpoint between these extremes. When Chris Stringer, of London’s Natural
History Museum, argued for this date at a conference in 1988, Poulianos rushed
the stage and had to be restrained (as recounted in James Shreeve’s excellent
book The Neandertal Enigma).
Poulianos’s strong feelings about the skull’s age are but one part of an in‐
creasingly idiosyncratic view of the prehistoric past. He has used the skull to
name a new species, Archanthropus europeus petralonsiensis, which he alone
recognizes, and which he believes is somehow ancestral to the Sarakatsani, a
modern population of nomadic pastoralists who inhabit the same area. He
claims to have uncovered bone fragments from fifteen other individuals in Pe‐
tralona, although he has never published evidence of this. What he has pub‐
lished is pictures of tools associated with the skull, but these do not appear to
show evidence of being anything other than unworked rocks.
With the entry of Poulianos’s son on to the scene, the Anthropological As‐
sociation of Greece has made more incredible announcements. It now claims to
have found evidence in Petralona and the nearby site of Nea Triglia of a
sculpted figurine from 500,000 years ago, fire from 1 million years ago and an‐
other new species, Homo trigliensis, on the basis of 10 to 11 million-year-old
stone and bone tools. These dates are at best controversial – the last one out‐
landish – and have not found support in international peer-reviewed periodicals.
In 1996 Poulianos finally won his legal battle with the Greek government
and, for reasons of preserving ‘intellectual freedom’, was able to take total con‐
trol of Petralona the following year. The Ministry of Culture has tried on nu‐
merous occasions since then to regain possession of the cave, but it remains in
the hands of the Poulianos family. The Petralona skull, meanwhile, remains un‐
der lock and key.
About the Authors
Dimitra Papagianni holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of Cam‐
bridge and was a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at the Centre for the
Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of Southampton, where she
retains an affiliation. She has taught courses on the Neanderthals for continuing
education at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Bath. She is the author
of Middle Palaeolithic Occupation and Technology in Northwestern Greece
and co-editor of Time and Change: Archaeological and Anthropological Per‐
spectives on the Long-Term in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.
Michael A. Morse holds a PhD in the history of science from the University of
Chicago. He is the author of How the Celts Came to Britain, selected as one of
the Times Literary Supplement’s Books of the Year for 2005.
The Neanderthals Rediscovered © 2013 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London
Text © 2013 Dimitra Papagianni and Michael A. Morse
ISBN 978-0-500- 77179-2
ISBN for USA only 978-0-500-77180-8 (e-book)
