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Solar Ship Sails in Search of Ancient Sunken City in Aegean Sea

The world's largest solar-powered boat is searching the coast of Greece for what may be one of Europe's oldest human settlements.
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/ Source: The Associated Press

The world's largest solar-powered boat has arrived in southern Greece to participate in an ambitious underwater survey that will seek traces of what could be one of the oldest human settlements in Europe. Working near a major prehistoric site, they will investigate a bay aptly called Kiladha — Greek for valley. The area was once dry land and archaeologists operating off the MS Turanor PlanetSolar hope it may contain sunken remains of buildings from Neolithic times, when farming started, about 9,000 years ago.

Mission leader Julien Beck, from the University of Geneva, said Tuesday the team picked Kiladha Bay because it laps on Greece's oldest and most important Neolithic site, the Franchthi Cave. "There are all these amazing finds from Franchthi — pottery, ornaments — but nothing resembling a village," Beck told the Associated Press. "So there has to be another place where they were producing these finds."

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— The Associated Press