Human evolution: hunter gatherers to Malta (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 10, 2025, 16:17 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

Earlier than thought:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/stone-age-seafarers-hunter-gatherer

"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.

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"From 2021 to 2023, Scerri and colleagues excavated a sinkhole at a site in northern Malta called Latnija (pronounced “Lat-nee-yuh”). They found sediment layers containing traces of human habitation: ashes from hearths, 64 stone tools and wild animal remains that bear signs of butchering.

"Radiocarbon dating of 32 charcoal pieces and one animal bone suggest that hunter-gatherers occupied the site for a millennium beginning about 8,500 years ago. The stone tools were typical of those used by hunter-gatherers on the European continent around the same time, the team says, suggesting that’s where they came from.

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"Genetic evidence from a recent study also lends support to the seafaring narrative. A DNA analysis of an 8,000-year-old individual from Tunisia shows European hunter-gatherer ancestry, another group of researchers reported March 12 in Nature. That ancestry could be from people coming south across the Mediterranean, from Malta. The implication, Scerri says, is that hunter-gatherers were “seafaring all over the place'”.

Comment: we were amazingly clever back then.