Several discoveries of lion bones in Greece, the Ukraine and the Balkans have confirmed that lions lived there certainly from 5th millennium BC till the 6th century BC, while according to the written sources they survived up to perhaps the 1st or even the 4th century AD, which was previously only a suspicion by some archaeologists. Thus the strong emphasis on lions in the earliest figurative Greek art, especially that of Mycenaean Greece from around 1600-1400 BC, reflected the world in which Greeks lived, rather than being based on stories from further east, as once thought.