Evidence of a winemaking enterprise and an array of culturally diverse pottery at he cave site of Areni 1, excavated in 2007 in the present village of Areni in the Vayots Dzor Province of Armenia, offers surprising new insights into the origins of modern civilizations.

Excavations also yielded an extensive array of Copper Age artifacts dating to between sixty-two hundred and fifty-nine hundred years ago.

The new discoveries within the cave move early bronze-age cultural activity in Armenia back by about eight hundred years.

Additional discoveries at the site include metal knives, seeds from more than thirty types of fruit, the remains of dozens of cereal species, rope, cloth, straw, grass, reeds and dried grapes and prunes.

The discovery of the earliest known winery, the Areni-1 winery, will be announced by archaeologists in January 2011, seven months after the discovery of the world's oldest leather shoe, the Areni-1 shoe, in the same cave.

The winery, which is over six-thousand years old, contains a wine press, fermentation vats, jars, and cups.

Archaeologists also found grape seeds and vines of the species Vitis vinifera.

Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the importance of the find, said, "The fact that winemaking was already so well developed in 4000 BC suggests that the technology probably goes back much earlier.”