Prehistoric hunter-gatherers were likely skilled seafarers who could make long and challenging journeys.
Stone tools, animal bones and other artifacts unearthed in Malta indicate that humans first inhabited the Mediterranean island 8,500 years ago, about a thousand years earlier than previously thought, researchers report April 9 in Nature. To reach Malta, these hunter-gatherers seemingly crossed at least 100 kilometers of open ocean, the team says.
The findings add to an emerging picture of systematic seafaring in the Stone Age. “There’s this new world of Mediterranean crossings in the Mesolithic that we didn’t know about,” says archaeological scientist Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.