A Greek Island’s First Settlers Weren’t Human An archaeological dig on Naxos is overturning our assumptions about who Neanderthals were — and how they differed from Homo sapiens In the 1960s, the U.S.-based behavioral scientist Alfred de Grazia bought a large piece of land on Stelida, a remote, scrubby hill on the Greek island of Naxos. He resided there every summer with his French wife Anne-Marie, a poet. The couple lived a quiet, secluded life until one afternoon in 2014, just a couple of weeks after her husband had passed away, Anne-Marie de Grazia peered out of her window to see two stooping figures planting little red flags along the edges of her garden.

After a brief exchange, it transpired that the pair were the archaeologists Tristan Carter and Katie Campeau, who were surveying the land for traces of Neanderthal toolmaking. Excited by the possibility, and in honor of her late husband, who would have been thrilled by the discovery, de Grazia wasted no time in granting the team full authorization to excavate on her property, with the approval of the Greek Ministry of Culture. The encounter would mark the beginning of the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project, a pioneering dig that is not only rewriting the Neanderthal story, but shrinking the distance between us and them.

It’s long been assumed that island colonization was an exclusively human activity. Only we could build boats and only we had the desire to navigate the oceans. The new finds at Stelida have exposed a weakness in the narrative, however: Modern humans are not supposed to have settled in Europe until around 50,000 years ago, and yet the lithics (tools and other worked stone) found on Naxos hint at island habitation as far back as 200,000 years ago. What’s more, many of these finds bear the hallmarks of Neanderthal craftsmanship, suggesting that the enigmatic hominin reached these islands either around the same time as humans or even before us, toppling our assumption that only modern humans had the navigational nous and curiosity to colonize these islands. (read on)