The find threatens the foundations of everything we were supposed to know about the dispersal of archaic hominids on their way out of Africa and into Europe. If until now it was thought that they used the land routes through South Asia or the interior of Arabia, new research indicates that they probably developed navigation techniques to cross the Mediterranean Sea half a million years ago.
Evidence found during previous archaeological excavations had revealed that the Aegean Islands have been inhabited for a long time, with artifacts dating back as far as 476,000 years (before the first known appearance of Homo sapiens) have been found.
That is why experts from the University of Patras (Greece) have re-studied the archipelago between Turkey, Greece and Crete to determine if ancient humans reached there by land or by sea. Their conclusion, based on data from the Middle Pleistocene (between 700,000 and 130,000 years ago), is that there is no other way in which these ancient hominids could have reached the islands other than by sea, they explain in a published article. in Quaternary International magazine.
“Human ancestors must have found a way to traverse large bodies of water. And if reliance on land bridges were not necessary for human migration, this may have implications for the way our ancestors and modern humans spread across the globe."
The question of when hominids began to navigate is difficult to answer. Historically, boats have tended to be made of wood, a material that is not used to surviving over time. For it is practically impossible to get a record of the first ships that crossed the oceans.
What does exist, however, is the detail of artifacts (stone tools that do not decompose, for example) and bones that have survived. New technologies also make it possible to reconstruct the way in which the world has changed during the last millennia.
The team led by geologist George Ferentinos carried out new analyzes on ancient tools found on Lesbos, Milos and Naxos. These objects have been linked to the Acholian style, developed around 1.76 million years ago and associated with Homo erectus in Africa and Asia. Several such instruments have been found also in Turkey, Greece and Crete dating back 1.2 million years, so their appearance in the archipelago makes sense.
Previous studies suggested that ancient humans reached the islands on foot during the ice ages. When the world freezes, the sea level drops and humans can cross places that, in warmer conditions, would be covered by water.
Ferentinos and his companions reconstructed the geography of the region, including a survey of the coastline around the Aegean islands dating back 450,000 years. To do this they used ancient river deltas, which can be used to infer sea level and subsidence rates driven by tectonic activity.
What they found is that the previous studies were incorrect. At its lowest point in the last 450,000 years, the Mediterranean sea level was approximately 225 meters lower than it is today. This means that while some of the islands were connected to each other when there was less body of water, the Aegean has remained consistently isolated from the surrounding land areas and it would have taken several kilometers of open water to reach the nearest of them. the islands.
There is, in addition, other evidence that suggests that the Aegean crossing was not the first maritime crossing. Sometime between 700,000 and a million years ago, archaic humans traveled by sea around Indonesia and the Philippines. All this evidence indicates that navigation was not a skill developed by Homo sapiens, but by their ancestors.
"Considering that archaic hominids were able to cross the Aegean Sea, they would also have been able to cross the Strait of Gibraltar," the experts write. "This allows us to review how southwestern Europe was populated from the Sinai Peninsula and Levantine plains through the Anatolian coastal zone and the Bosporus land bridge in the mid-to-late Middle Pleistocene, taking into account that skills for crossing the sea would not be restricted to modern humans," they conclude.
