Stone-age hunters crossed the Mediterranean, study finds
Long-distance seafarers crossed the Mediterranean far earlier than scientists had believed, a new study has found.
Excavations at a cave on the island of Malta have uncovered stone tools, cooking site and animal skeletons from 8,500 years ago — 1,000 years before the first farmers arrived on the island, according to findings published in the journal Nature.
The findings 'force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts,' said Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Malta.
'Connections' in that case refers to the possibility that hunter-gatherer communities may have made regular trips between communities scattered across Mediterranean islands — and that they may have played a crucial role in wiping out island species previously thought to have gone extinct long before the arrival of humans.
Because humans aren't native to Malta — or indeed any small island — that finding represents the oldest known long-distance seafaring in the Mediterranean.
Thanks to better-known ancient travelers like the Greeks, Phoenicians and Romans, that sea would become legendary for its maritime traffic.
But scientists had long believed that its many islands were only accessible to relatively advanced, settled farming civilizations — an assumption that Wednesday's paper calls into question.
In the cave site on northern Malta, scientists found trace remnants of the roasted carcasses of red deer, tortoises and birds, as well as the remains of the marine life that once swarmed around Malta.
'We found remains of seal, various fish, including grouper, and thousands of edible marine gastropods, crabs and sea urchins, all indisputably cooked,' coauthor James Blinkhorn of the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology said in a statement.
The crossing, likely carried out in dugout canoes without sails, would have been harrowing: a 60-mile (100 km) passage over open water at a grueling pace of about 2 miles per hour. To survive it, these pioneering hunters would have relied on their knowledge of prevailing winds and sea currents, and navigated by the stars and notable landmarks.
Even so, 'these seafarers would have had over several hours of darkness in open water,' coauthor Nicholas Vella of the University of Malta said in a statement.
The finding raises more questions than it answers. Scientists don't know how these hunters knew that Malta was there; how far back in time such crossings were carried out; or if similar sites lie, waiting to be discovered, on other islands across the Mediterranean.
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