Recent archaeological excavations of the cave of Cyclops, located in the southern cliffs of the islet of Youra (northern Sporades, Greece) have provided evidence of continuous human activity from the Mesolithic Period (10000–6800 BC) up to the beginning of the Final Neolithic (4600/ 4500–3300/3200 BC). The results of the investigation of its Mesolithic stratigraphy lead to the assumption that the economy of the prehistoric local human community was based predominantly upon the exploitation of marine resources (Sampson 1996a, 1996b, 1998; Powell 2003). Archaeological evidence suggests that the island fishermen also exploited mammals, as indicated by the discovery of a huge assemblage of bones of Sus scrofa, particularly numerous in the Lower Mesolithic levels, where they also displayed a larger size in comparison to those of the same species found in the Upper Mesolithic layers (Trantalidou 2003). Thus, beyond the marine resources, Sus appears to represent the wild animal most widely consumed by the local human community. The date of 7530 cal. BC–7100 cal. BC (8th millennium BC) was obtained for the oldest bones of these prehistoric ungulates, by radiocarbon analysis performed at the Beta Analytic Laboratory of Miami (USA) (Masseti 2002). In the light of archaeozoological evidence, early human societies which based their subsistence mainly on marine resources also feature a certain association with pigs, which has been registered from other prehistoric European and Mediterranean archaeological contexts. In Italian coastal areas, for example, this can be observed in the reports from the II Mesolithic phase of the cave of Uzzo, in north-western Sicily (Tagliacozzo 1993), from the Early Neolithic–Chalcolithic layers of the Grotta del Genovese on the small island of Levanzo in the Egadi archipelago (Sicily) (Graziosi 1962; Cassoli & Tagliacozzo 1982), and possibly also from the proto-Mycenaean settlement (Middle–Late Bronze Age) of the islet of Vivara, in the Phlegraean archipelago (Gulf of Naples) (Marazzi 1998, 2001; Costantini & Costantini 2001; Pepe 2001). In northern Europe, the exploitation of pig resources has been found associated with several postglacial human settlements of the Baltic area, such as the Ertebølle Mesolithic culture of western Denmark (Rowley- Conwy 1984), of southern Sweden (Rowley-Conwy 1998), and of the Jutland peninsula (Rowley-Conwy 1994).
New discoveries at Mokarta, a Bronze Age hilltop settlement in western Sicily