Prehistoric Georgia

[1] Later Lower Paleolithic Acheulian sites have been discovered in the highlands of Georgia, particularly in the caves of Kudaro (1600 m above sea level), and Tsona (2100 m).

Buffered by the Caucasus Mountains, and benefiting from the ameliorating effects of the Black Sea, the region appears to have served as a biogeographical refugium throughout the Pleistocene.

These geographic features spared the Southern Caucasus from the severe climatic oscillations and allowed humans to prosper throughout much of the region for millennia.

[7] Signs of Neolithic culture, and the transition from foraging and hunting to agriculture and stockraising, are found in Georgia from at least the beginning of the 6th millennium BC.

[9] In the highlands of eastern Anatolia and South Caucasus, the right combination of domesticable animals and sowable grains and legumes made possible the earliest agriculture.

[10] The entire region is surmised to have been, in the period beginning in the last quarter of the 4th millennium BC, inhabited by people who were possibly ethnically related and of Hurrian stock.

Their burial mounds have yielded finely wrought vessels in gold and silver; a few are engraved with ritual scenes suggesting the Middle Eastern cult influence.

[12] By the last centuries of the 2nd millennium BC, ironworking had made its appearance in the South Caucasus, and the true Iron Age began with the introduction of tools and weapons on a large scale and of superior quality to those hitherto made of copper and bronze, a change which in most of the Near East may not have come before the tenth or ninth centuries BC.