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Museums at Halkidiki
Anthropological Museum AEE at Petralona
Thirty-five kilometres from Thessaloniki on the old Thessaloniki-Nea
Moudania national highway is the village of Petralona. The cave
and the Anthropological Museum are a further 2 km beyond the village.
The museum was built and financed in 1978 by the Anthropological
Society of Greece (AEE), which owns it. It opened in 1979. The purpose
of the museum is to showcase the finds from the Petralona cave,
the prehistoric culture of Greece, Europe, and the entire world,
and finds representing the entire palaeoanthropological area of
Greece.
The finds include replicas of the mausoleum of Archanthropus europeus
petralonsiensis, the oldest traces of fire ever found (from the
24th geological stratum in the Petralona cave, which is more than
one million years old), the earliest stone and bone tools, which
were found at Nea Triglia in Halkidiki (11 million years old), and
finds from open spaces before the cave-dwelling era in Nea Triglia,
the island of Evvia, Ptolemaida in Halkidiki, the Aegean, other
parts of Greece, and Africa.
There are also murals by the folk painter Hristos Kagaras illustrating
the emergence of life on Earth and Archanthropus teaching his children
how to make tools of stone and bone, the evolution of life according
to Aristotle, and the evolution of human life over the last 11 million
years according to Poulianos.
The museum has a conference room, geological and palaeoanthropological
conservation workshops, and a library.
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Outside View |
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Fossilised tortoise of the Mesozoic era
(65 million years old) |
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Reconstruction of a mausoleum with an
Archanthropus skeleton |
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Reconstruction of an Archanthropus skull |
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Traces of fire |
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www.gohalkidiki.com 
