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Archaeologists have unearthed the earliest building complex ever discovered in Greece, shaking up how they understand the ancient world.

The complex of 60 marble buildings dates back 4,600 years and was discovered on a tiny mountain-peak-shaped island off the coast of the Aegean island of Keros.

Specialists began excavating the site four years ago, but it is only thanks to more detailed data analysis over the past 12 months that the true scale of the complex has been revealed.

Experts say the latest findings have “transformed” their understanding of Bronze Age culture, suggesting early Greeks were “organisationally, technically and politically” much more advanced than previously thought.

It is now understood that early Bronze Age Greeks made at least 3,500 sea voyages to transport materials to build the glittering complex, which was specially constructed to glisten in the sun.

The journeys, totalling around 45,000 miles, saw them ship between 7,000 and 10,000 tonnes of shining white marble from one Aegean island to another.

"It is by far the largest prehistoric marine transport operation that has ever come to light anywhere in the world," Dr Julian Whitewright, a leading maritime archaeologist at the University of Southampton, told The Independent.

"It demonstrates quite clearly just how important, and integral to their culture, seafaring was to these early Bronze Age Aegean people."

The marble buildings are understood to have made up a huge religious sanctuary, and the “mini-mountain”-shaped site, known as Dhaskalio, is thought to have a key religious significance.

Greek mythology traditionally views mountain tops as the dwelling place of the gods. It is now believed Dhaskalio may have inspired this core belief.

"It is potentially a fundamental place of origin for the phenomenon of sacred mountains within the Greek world," the world's leading expert on Greek mountaintop sanctuaries, Dr Alan Peatfield of University College Dublin's School of Archaeology, also told The Independent.

Nothing like this monumental complex has ever been found from this period in or around Greece before, according to the project's co-director, Michael Boyd of Cambridge University's McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

He said: "Our investigation has been transforming our understanding of early Bronze Age Cycladic culture and suggests that these very early Greeks were organisationally, technically and politically much more advanced than previously thought.”

Dhaskalio was built within around 100 years of the creation of Stonehenge, the first Egyptian pyramids, the great cities of the Indus Valley and the first known Mesopotamian kingdoms.

These Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus Valley and Western European traditions were almost certainly not directly related to each other, but were instead driven by common stimuli, including the spread and intensification of early metal usage, and the mercantile, cultural and political progress that ensued.

Dhaskalio shows that, contrary to previous belief, Greece was part of that much wider phenomenon, suggesting the site played an important role in the early cultural development of the Greek world.