In this article, we focus on that part of Cretan's history between the time of its emergence and the arrival of the first humans on the islands. Based upon hitherto described fossils, the pre-prehistory of Crete and its early inhabitants can be reconstructed. From the 1970s on, Dutch researchers started excavations on Crete, in close collaboration with the University of Athens. But Crete also appeared to be a treasure box of much older remains, and 63 localities with fossils have been reported. The island of Crete as we know it, yielded a vast amount of cultural remains, among which those of the Minoan culture became world famous. This is the domain of palaeontology, where geological epochs are revealed by means of fossils in the broad sense. There is far more prehistory than history, and major part lies well before the archaeological prehistory. However, this is only a very small part of the chronological truth: the world did of course not start with human culture. The word prehistory validates this idea, as indeed those epochs are from before the emergence of written or pictographical sources, in shrt, what we call 'history'. In other words, epochs that are revealed to us by means of artefacts, left overs of a human culture. When archaeologists speak of prehistory, they have epochs in mind as bronze age, stone age.
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