you're going to do you know the thing you're going to Hello and welcome back to the history of ancient Greece.

Episode 3, The Stone Age.

The further back in history we look, the less secure is our knowledge of the specific details.

This is especially true during the prehistoric period, which is the period before there is writing. True history in the sense of specific events involving specific people would not begin until the development of writing.

What we think we know derives from two sources, archaeology and oral tradition

and later myths and legends. Both have their limitations though. Those of legend are clear

enough. Stories grow and are distorted as they are handed down orally from generation to generation.

Circumstantial detail often derives only from the storyteller's imagination.

Then, when writing did develop,

the early historians used these myths

as historical fact in reconstructing the early history of the Greeks.

Modern historians thus must treat these tales with skepticism,

although it is possible that some of them contain small elements of truth.

Archaeology deals directly with the raw material of history, but it must be interpreted.

Conclusions often have to depend on samples, and the samples may be unrepresentative or insufficient.

Plus, new evidence can be on earth that radically changes our interpretation.

So keep in mind that until the advent of writing, all dates are approximate and subject to controversy. With that warning out of the way, let's try and piece together a narrative for the earliest

dwellers of the Greek mainland and the Aegean Sea.

Our story starts tens of thousands of years ago in the latter portion of the Stone Age, so named because the people primarily use stone, in addition to bone and wood, to make tools and weapons.

The Stone Age is conventionally subdivided into three periods.

The Paleolithic, which is Greek for old stone, Mesolithic, Middlestone, and Neolithic, Newstone.

The first human beings in Greece, and ostensibly Europe,

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