Experts have added another skillset to at least one group of hunter-gatherers: paddling. Research now shows that some stalwart seafarers stroked their way from mainland Europe to the island of Malta, about 60 miles away, about 8,500 years ago, according to an article in the journal Nature. The finding represents the longest known watery crossing of its time — all the more remarkable because it predates the invention of boats with sails.
The researchers hypothesize that the canoeists tapped into sea currents and winds to propel them to their destination. They likely navigated by using landmarks and, possibly, stars since they almost certainly completed part of their journey at night. Such a distance, at an average speed of about 2.5 miles an hour, would require that part of the journey to take place after sunset.
“Even on the longest day of the year, these seafarers would have had over several hours of darkness in open water,” Nicholas Vella, a University of Malta researcher and co-author of the study, said in a press release.
Early Human Settlement
Evidence of life on the island pegged to that time was surprising not only because of the distance required to reach them but because the arrival then predates the rise of agriculture by about 1,000 years. Historians had often assumed that, without the technological shifts agriculture produced, such voyages would have been impossible.
Human signs of life linked to the time when the explorers must have reached Malta included stone tools, hearths, and cooked food waste.
“We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including [red deer], long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time,” Eleanor Scerri, a Max Planck Institute anthropologist and co-author, said in the press release. “They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today.”
Read More: Do We Know When Ancient Humans First Built Boats?
Seafaring Abilities of Hunter-Gatherers
The cave site of Latnija in northern Malta also suggests that the crossing wasn’t a one-off in terms of aquatic exploitation. The researchers also found cooked remains of seal, multiple kinds of fish, crabs, and sea urchins, among other seafood.
Such discoveries raise the question of whether other small, remote Mediterranean islands were inhabited. If so, did people from those islands visit each other? The Malta find opens up another line of investigation about the possibility of such interactions, as well as the extent to which hunting and fishing there affected the ecosystem.
“The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts,” Scerri concluded in the release.
Read More: Two Different Early Human Species Walked the Same Lake 1.5 Million Years Ago
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Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
