page_title: Petralona cave
section_title: Layer 10
hierarchical_section_title: Petralona cave / Petralona skull / Layer 10
caption_attribution_description: English: The skull of Petralona. Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
context_page_description: The Petralona cave also Cave of the Red Stones, a karst formation, is located at 300 m above sea-level on the western foot of Mount Katsika, about 1 km east of the village of Petralona, about 35 km south-east of Thessaloniki city on the Chalkidiki peninsula, Greece. The site came to public attention when in 1960 a fossilized archaic human skull was found. The cave had been discovered accidentally only a year earlier after erosion had left clefts in the rock. "Bejeweled" with impressive stalactite and stalagmite formations and holding an abundance of fossils, the cave soon attracted geologists and paleontologists. After decades of excavations the cave is open to the public and scientific work is documented and presented in an adjacent archaeological museum.
  The cave's most prominent fossil specimen, since known among paleoanthropologists as the "Petralona Skull".
  The on-site Anthropological Museum of Petralona displays a selection of the objects that have been found in the cave.
context_section_description: In 1992 an international team published its results of a uranium-series dating analysis of the small cavern, called "The Mausoleum", where the skull was allegedly found and the sediments, named "Layer 10" by Poulianos. The results confirm earlier findings "that the whole of layer 10 represents a long time span, from about 160 ka to more than 350 ka". The minimum age refers to the brown calcite layer, which covered and cemented the hominid skull to the wall. The fossil encrustation is insufficient to date it by alpha-spectrometric, uranium-series methods, yet its minimum age was concluded to be also 160.000 years.
  Today, most academics who have analyzed the Petralona remains classify the hominid as Homo erectus. However, the Archanthropus of Petralona has also been classified as a Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthal (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) and as an early generic class of Homo sapiens. A. Poulianos, on the other hand, believes that the Petralona cranium is derived from an independent class of hominids unrelated to Homo erectus.
  Runnels and van Andel summarise the situation as follows:
  "The only known hominid fossil in Greece that may be relevant is the Petralona hominid, found by chance in 1960 in a deep cavern in the Chalkidiki. Controversy surrounds the interpretation of this cranium, and it has been variously classified as Homo erectus, as a classic Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis), and as an early representative of Homo sapiens in a generalized sense. The consensus among today's paleoanthropologists [is centered around the idea] that the cranium belongs to an archaic hominid distinguished from Homo erectus and both the classic Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Whatever the final classification may be, the cranium has been provisionally dated to ca. 200–400 thousand years old and it is thus possible that the Petralona hominid is a representative of the lineage responsible for the Thessalian Lower Paleolithic sites."
  The Anthropological Association of Greece has continued to announce new findings in the cave, such as 4 isolated teeth, then two 800,000 year old pre-human skeletons, and a great number of fossils of various species.
  The fossils have been preserved at the Geology School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki since 1960.
caption: The skull of Petralona. Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.
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