Epipalaeolithic

Cyprus was never joined to the mainland by a land bridge — not, at any rate, during the time humans have existed. Reaching it meant crossing at least sixty kilometres of open sea, and so the island stayed empty while villages already stood on the Levantine coast opposite.

The earliest trace of people on Cyprus is Aetokremnos, a rock shelter at the southern tip of the Akrotiri peninsula, roughly twelve thousand years old. Beneath the overhang lay a deposit in which stone tools were mixed with the bones of pygmy hippopotami — endemic animals the size of a pig that lived nowhere else.

What actually happened at Aetokremnos is still argued over. Some read it as a hunters’ camp whose occupants wiped out the island fauna; others hold that the bones accumulated naturally and people arrived later. One thing is not in dispute: the pygmy hippos and elephants vanished at about the moment humans first set foot here.

After Aetokremnos the record goes quiet for nearly a thousand years. Permanent settlement begins in the Neolithic, arriving with people who brought grain and livestock with them.