This Greek Cave is Teeming With History—and Bodies | National Geographic

Classical Greece didn't just come out of nowhere. If you really want to understand where the Greece of Athens, the Greece of the Acropolis, came from, you need to look way back in the past. You need to look several thousand years back in the past at places like this.

This is a la pocha cave on southern Greece's Mone Peninsula, a cave used by some of the earliest farmers in Europe. It is a very important site; it's there, it's this cave in Greece and one of the richest in Europe. Some have suggested it was the mythical gateway to Hades, the Greek underworld, and it's easy to see why.

In various pockets all around this nearly 1,000-foot-long cavern, scientists have exhumed more than 150 bodies. Archaeologists Honestasia Pop, Athena CEO, and Bill Parkinson continued to find more from 8,000 years ago until about 5,000 years ago. Agricultural villagers—farmers, some of the first farmers in Europe—buried their dead in here. They carried out ritual activities here, and these are the people who eventually laid the foundation for what became classical Greece.

Compared to other ancient civilizations, it seems the people here in Greece never had it easy. The cave provides a window into a key period in human history: the Neolithic. When, by around ten thousand years ago, humans first started to give up hunting and gathering and began settling down, it's the first time period in human life that people start living in a way like us. They are the cultural roots; they base their diet mostly in grains, like us today.

Depending on where you lived and what resources you had access to, some societies during the Neolithic were much more primed for greatness than others. Some of the objects are so valuable that it's like what we call hand carry, and that's basically the courier is handcuffed to the briefcase and escorted through security.