One of the most important excavations’ locations of recent years, under the responsibility of the inspector of antiquities Mr Adamantios Sampson, is the island of Gioura in the Sporades Islands’ complex. The findings from the Cyclops’ Cave enlighten impressively our knowledge of the period of the remote Hellenic prehistory, the Mesolithic era.

It has been proved that, at least 10,000 years ago, people who lived in the Sporades complex used very advanced techniques of fishing and shipping, they hunted or kept goats and they had most probably acquired a very productive expertise in fishing.

The Mesolithic era is considered the transitional stage between the long Palaeolithic period during which man was simply a food gatherer and the Neolithic period during which man tamed plants and animals and was transformed to a farmer or animal breeder and established permanent settlements.

As the late professor of Prehistoric Archaeology Dimitirs Theocharis brilliantly pointed out, the term Mesolithic "is becoming only for the developments in Western Europe" while he considered that "as to the Neolithic revolution in Greece it does not seem possible for it to have been transferred to a deserted country".

When the above were written by D Theocharis in 1976, the only findings known were those of Frachthi in Ermionida in the Peloponnese, which have been dated between 7500 and 6500 BC and even before that time. The findings include:

Fish bones which prove that there was fishing activity. Pieces of obsidian, a hard glassy volcanic rock from the island of Milos, which indicated the possible existence of shipping as well as mining technology.

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