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Modern Description: At 4 km a road, signed left to the Charkadio Cave, ends after little more than a kilometre at a gate, leading to a small, modern stone theatre beside a spring of mildly ferrous water. A path leads up to the cave just above, the entrance to which is normally locked unless excavation is in progress. It is here that the island's very important palaeontological finds were made in 1971 by Nikolaos Symeonides of the University of Athens – not only the dwarf elephants, which have inevitably captured the imagination more than the other finds, but also of deer, tortoises, and small mammals from as far back as 150,000 years ago. The cave is broad but not particularly deep: it has filled with dust and alluvial soil over the millennia, and it is in this rich sediment that the finds were made.
The species of dwarf-elephant found in the Charkadio cave (Palaeoloxodon Antiquus Falconeri) was the last elephant to dwell in Europe and became extinct only 4,000 years ago. Its ancestors must have come to Tilos during the Quaternary, when a lowering of the sea level rendered the island effectively an extension of the mainland. With the subsequent rising of sea levels, the animals found themselves on an island cut off from the mainland: over many generations they grew smaller to adapt to the much reduced area and quantity of food available to them. Those whose remains were found in the Charkadio cave were little bigger than a very large dog, standing only about 1.30 m tall. The ongoing excavations have uncovered many thousands of pieces of bone, coming from more than 40 dwarf elephants, living on Tilos between 4,000 and 45,000 years ago, while lower down (at an excavated depth of 8m) were found the bones of deer from approximately 140,000 years ago. Traces of human occupation from the Neolithic to mediaeval periods have also been found in the cave. The quantity and variety of finds made here make this one of Europe's most significant palaeontological sites.
The finds leave a number of important questions still unanswered. It is not yet established whether the reason for the extinction of these elephants was a climatic change in the Late Quaternary Period, or the result of a major volcanic event. Nor is it clear whether man arrived on the island before, or after, the extinction of the elephants. For this reason we cannot be certain whether the death of the elephants in the cave was a result of natural catastrophe, or whether man was responsible for killing them for food - or at least for transferring their body parts to the cave.
A path leads up above the cave to the mediaeval castle of Mesariá which crowns the summit above. This is one of the seven strongholds on Tilos with which the Knights of St. John fortified the island in the 14th and 15th centuries. The primary function of these military stations was as garrisoned look-outs; but their small enceintes of walls also provided a temporary and crowded refuge for the local inhabitants in times of danger.
Trismegistos Geo: 58687

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

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