A Prehistoric Site at Meteora
Important Update (2025): Theopetra Cave after 8 long years has finally reopened for the public. The Theopetra Cave and the museum remain open every day except Tuesdays, from 08:30 AM to 15:30 PM. The entrance fee/ticket is 5 Euros per person with special rates for children/students/elderly. With the same ticket you can access both the museum and the cave.
Theopetra Cave, located just 5 km from Meteora, is one of Greece’s most significant archaeological prehistoric sites. Over the past few decades, it has uncovered many prehistoric artifacts from various periods of our prehistory. The findings include stone tools, burials, animal remains, and the oldest artificial structure. With its excellent location, offering easy access to fresh, clean water, food sources, raw materials, and a strategic vantage point, this unique cave’s location attracted early inhabitants who could recognize these advantages from miles away. Early prehistoric settlers continuously utilized the cave for more than 130,000 years!
From Neanderthals to Homo Sapiens
The site is unique from an archaeological perspective because it showcases the records of two significant cultural transitions within a single location: the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans and the later shift from hunter-gathering to farming following the end of the last Ice Age. The cave features a large rectangular chamber measuring 500 square meters, located at the foot of a limestone hill that rises northeast above the village of Theopetra.
The cave entrance is substantial, measuring 17 meters wide and 3 meters high. Its location is situated at the base of the Chasia mountain range, which serves as the natural boundary between the Thessaly and Macedonia prefectures. In front of the cave flows the small Lithaios River, a tributary of the Pineios River. This proximity to fresh, clean water not only provided the cave dwellers with easy access, eliminating the need for lengthy daily trips to water sources, but it also increased the chances of the cave’s inhabitants encountering other hunter-gatherers who followed these waterways.
Theopetra Cave: An almost continuous human presence
Excavations, which have been systematically carried out over the past decades, have unearthed light geological deposits dating to the Pleistocene and Holocene periods as well as anthropogenic deposits, indicating that the cave had been continuously inhabited during the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic, and the Neolithic periods.
Specimens such as coal and human bones prove that the cave was occupied from about 135,000 BC to 4000 BC and that temporary use continued during the Bronze Age and historic times up to 1955. Even after that, the shepherds used the cave occasionally to shelter their herds until the excavations began. It is the first cave-dwelling as recorded in Thessaly during the Palaeolithic period. The latest cave findings published in 2012 by the lead scientist and her team responsible for the excavations, Paleoanthropologist Dr. Ekaterini (Nina) Kyparissi-Apostolika, have raised the time records of the cave’s dwelling to 135.000 BC.
Among the oldest human footprints in Europe
Excavations uncovered three human footprints dated to approximately 135,000 years ago. This remarkable find consists of four footprints in a row, believed to have been made by children aged 2 to 7. The children likely walked on the remnants of a fire, which later petrified, allowing the footprints to be preserved today. The stratigraphic sequence of Theopetra cave spans three cold periods: during the Middle era around 25,000 BC, throughout the Upper Paleolithic, and at the end of the Upper Paleolithic period (the close of the Pleistocene era).
Since 1987, excavations and studies at Theopetra have been conducted by a scientific research group from the Department of Paleoanthropology-Speleology, led by Dr. Ekaterini (Nina) Kyparissi-Apostolika. Among the objects discovered in the cave are stone tools from the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods, as well as Neolithic pottery, bone and shell artifacts, skeletons dating from 9000 and 8000 BC, and traces of plants and seeds that provide insights into the dietary habits of the time.
In 2010, it was announced that an optical dating test known as Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) was conducted on a recently excavated stone wall found at the entrance of Theopetra’s cave. This test, which was applied to quartz grains found within the stones, revealed that the wall is the oldest known artificial structure. Dating back 23,000 years, the stone wall in front of the Theopetra cave was likely built to barricade the entrance and protect its inhabitants from cold winds during the peak of the last Ice Age. This discovery marks it as the oldest known example of human construction.
Theopetra Cave is definitely a site nearby Meteora worth visiting, not to be missed by anyone!
A massive stone wall. 21,000 bc. How is it overlooked that they created this structure of several ton stones when they supposedly barely had tools? Hmmm, not sure how but I’m not just going to accept that prehistoric man just magically figured it out.
Not magically, They were human beings (homo sapien). They were just plain smart and inventive and figured out a way to do it. In other words, just like us, but at the beginning of our emergence as THE primary hominid on this planet. They should not be denigrated. If we do so, then we would be denigrating who we humans are now.
That’s an excellent reply. When anyone says that our ancient ancestors could not build the great pyramids or travel long distances around the earth or invent amazing tools or build amazing things, without the help of aliens or without magic, it really does insult human potential, creativity and ingenuity of the past and in the present.
Its a fact that we can’t even build alot of the structures from the past
But if civilization was around earlier than the sumerians why are they considered the first civilization? We ignore truth to pad the egos of scientists who would do anything to not be proven wrong considering their entire being is based on their wrong opinions.
I am an art historian. When we use that term, as in Sumer is the first civilization, we are not talking about buildings. Instead, that refers to what we are able to gauge about the complexity of that society – the government, language (writing is often a part of that), buildings, religious institution, social structure, economic structure, ext. For us to call something a civilization, it needs to meet a set of criteria. You can have well-developed buildings, networks, religion, language, ext before you have civilizations. In fact, Turkey has many cities, towns, and occupied areas that predate Sumer, but they just don’t meet the criteria to be a civilization yet.
I agree our ancestors were not stupid, we have lost ancient technology if anything to argue or to be disappointed about. The Greece were very smart people
Culture was animistic, hunter gather Matrifocal Sun as female not male.
Men were warriors of the Goddess.
And this is what humans have become, smh.
Maybe, just maybe we lost that particular knowledge because it became irrelevant. New building materials and techniques would have made monolithic construction a terrible choice. Don’t get me wrong, the trilithon stones are one of the most amazing things man ever built. If we were trying to accomplish a foundation that large today there are much cheaper, less labor intensive, quicker, etc.. ways to do it. It’s ridiculous to say that we can’t figure out how to build that way today. The current largest shipping crane can lift 10,000 tons. More than 10× the weight of a trilithon stone. Even the largest 15 ton pyramid stone could be easily moved by an average construction crane.
Just being smart doesn’t explain normal questions such as how they lifted heavy stones, chiseled them, etc..If indeed there was technology that helped them build these structures. It defies logic that all of it was lost and that there was never a find in the archeological records to prove the existence of such technology. Aliens; perhaps
The wall is made from roughly formed stones of differing sizes. It does not resemble a finely cut block stone wall. So think of the stones as looking more like chucks of rocks you can find around a mountain/cave that are stacked one on top of each other randomly in a pile. The use of stone hammers is also very ancient, predating Homo Sapiens, and have been used extensively for breaking and shaping rock effectively in many cultures. Stone hammers are found at almost all of our oldest building sites, showing the wear and tear of their use.