8,500 years ago, a group of hunters-gatherers navigated the Mediterranean until reaching Malta, an extraordinary feat that happened a thousand years before the emergence of agriculture, which changed the way of life to a sedentary, more developed, and based on livestock and crops.
These human groups not only reached the island of Malta, but also occupied it and exploited their resources, as demonstrated by the remains found in the Latnija site, which retains the oldest evidence of occupation that exist on the island.
The details of the investigation, led by Eleanor Scerri, of the Max Plank of Geoantropology of Germany, and made in collaboration with the University of Malta, the Catalan Institut of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolved (Iphes-Cerca) and the University Rovira I Virgili (URV), of Tarragona (Spain), have been published this Wednesday in the journal.
Until now, the only indications of navigation at this time have been found in the Pacific, in groups that were traveling by cabotage (bordering the coasts), but this is the first time that it is documented in the Mediterranean.
The research group published by the study believes that these pioneers started from the nearby island of Sicily, about one hundred kilometers from Malta, and that they made the crossing without instruments or equipment of any kind, only guided by the position of the stars, marine currents and coastal references.
These navigators could advance between 3 and 4 kilometers per hour, which means that the crossing could last between 24 and 30 hours, some made during the night.
And although historically migrations have been driven by the need to look for resources, for Ethel Allué, an IPHES-CERCA researcher and co-author of the study, this feat reflects “the explorer instinct of human beings, which we have always sought to know new territories.”
For Scerri, these results not only extend Malta’s prehistory in a thousand years, but also force the navigation skills of the communities of hunter-gatherers, their connections with other groups of the Mediterranean basin and the environmental impacts of all this.
What the study makes it clear is that, despite stereotypes, hunting and collection groups not only lived from inner hunting, but there were also groups, inhabitants of coastal areas, who knew perfectly well the fishing techniques both in the rivers and in the sea.
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Humans traveled through the Mediterranean a millennium before the arrival of agriculture
The problem is that, due to the rise in sea level, many possible deposits “are now submerged and we cannot see those evidence, explains Allué in statements to Efe.
Five years ago, the first excavations of the site found more recent evidence, of the Neolithic, but by continuing to excavate in greater depth, the team discovered mesolithic levels, almost 9,000 years ago, in which there were no human remains, but a variety of archaeological remains.
The site contained stone tools, households (bonfires), remains of cooked food and a notable diversity of animal species that had been cooked and consumed, from remains of red deer, which until now was believed to be extinguished in malt at that time, to turtles, large birds (some now disappeared today), focas and various types of fish such as mere.
Thousands of remains of marine mollusks, such as snails, hedgehogs and crabs have also been found, many of them with obvious signs of cooking.
In fact, one of the strengths of the study have been the analysis of the Pirroarcheological Registry: the fingerprints of the use of fire, the type of fuel used and its relationship with the natural environment.
“The fire tells us how they lived, how they organized and how they adapted to the landscape. Here we found remains of coal, of the wood they used in the homes that was mainly from the lentisco, a plant that was probably the most dominated of their surroundings and that was a good fuel,” explains Allué.
Remains of Palmito have also been found, a plant that, due to its characteristics, could have been used for construction, basketry, or as fuel.
“Luckily, the Fire Registry was very well preserved, which has allowed us to go beyond its simple detection and rebuild human practices that could otherwise have gone unnoticed,” says Aitor Burguet-Coca, postdoctoral researcher of the IPHES-CERCA.
And although in general, the fires served to protect, cook or heat up, “in this case we can affirm that they used them to cook,” concludes Ethel Allué.
The objective of the team is now studying this Maltese site to see if there are evidence of human occupation at higher levels, and also the rest of the island and other smaller and remote islands in the Mediterranean, which have their own ecosystems and could be occupied. You have to continue exploring them.
With EFE information.
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