Stone Age hunter-gatherers may have been surprisingly skilled seafarers

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.

There has been a long-held view that hunter-gatherers could not routinely and intentionally cross large bodies of water, she says. While evidence exists of earlier sea crossings by hominids elsewhere — such as humans arriving in Australia at least 40,000 years ago­ — those instances appear to be one-offs, possibly explainable by shorter journeys gone awry by bad weather, Scerri says. “It doesn’t look like there was this sort of systematic coming and going.”

But the seafaring abilities of Malta’s Stone Age immigrants, she argues, indicates they were clearly capable of such journeys.

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.

Malta’s closest neighbor is Sicily, which is about 85 kilometers to the north. However, Scerri says, a powerful east-west ocean current suggests the best route would have been to leave from an easterly point on that island, like the Gulf of Gela, to “take advantage of the current.” That trip covers about 100 kilometers.

The team did not find any boat remains, leaving the type of craft used uncertain. However, five ancient canoes discovered in northern Italy might offer a clue, Scerri says. Although these canoes are about 7,000 years old, they indicate what people could make at the time. Each vessel was hollowed out from a single tree trunk, the largest measuring 11 meters long, and designed for seagoing, Scerri says, with “these weird holes in them that might point to some sort of primitive outriggers.”

Experiments with replicas of such canoes suggest travel speeds of about 4 kilometers per hour — or about 25 hours to cover 100 kilometers. “They would have had to have navigated at least through part of the night,” Scerri says, which would have required knowledge of the stars and currents.

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”.

These findings fit with tentative evidence of connections between Mediterranean societies, says Cyprian Broodbank, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who peer-reviewed Scerri’s team’s study.

The new findings bring us “closer to potentially confirming exchanges of [hunter-gatherer] people, technologies and suchlike between the two sides of the Mediterranean, earlier than so far attested,” Broodbank says. Previous research suggested that late Stone Age farmers settled on Malta about 7,400 years ago. These people, while still using primarily stone tools, had begun cultivating crops and domesticating animals, moving away from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Roughly 9,000 years ago, Stone Age farmers were moving into mainland Europe from the Fertile Crescent and Anatolia, or what is now much of Turkey. This expansion “is one of the most fundamentally transformative things that ever happened to Europe,” says archaeologist Rowan McLaughlin of Maynooth University in Ireland. He speculates that disruptions brought by these farmers may have prompted some hunter-gatherers to leave for Malta.