The discovery of stone tools, hearths and cooked food waste at a cave site in Latniya on the Mediterranean island of Malta indicates that hunter-gatherers had crossed at least 100 km of open water to arrive on the island 8,500 years ago.
Hunters and Gatherers had crossed at least 100 km of open water to arrive in Malta 8,500 years ago. Image credits: Daniel Clark/MPI GEA.
Maltese archipelago is a chain of smallest islands in the Mediterranean.
Humans were not thought to have reached and lived such a small, isolated island, about 7,500 years ago, until the Neolithic regional shift to life.
In the standard view, the limited resources and ecological vulnerability of the small island, combined with the technical challenges of long-distance sailors, meant that hunter-gatherers were unable or unfulfilled to take these journeys.
“Relying on the use of sea-level currents and wind breezes, as well as the practice of exploring landmarks, stars and other paths, there is a crossing of about 100 km per hour at a speed of about 4 km per hour.
“Even on the longest day of the year, these sailors would have been open water in the darkness of hours.”
At the site of a cave in Latniya in the northern Merry area of Malta, researchers discovered human traces in the form of stone tools, hearths and cooked food waste.
“At this location, we recovered a variety of animals, including hundreds of bodies of deer, birds, turtles and foxes,” said Dr. Matthew Stewart, a researcher at Griffith University.
“Some of these wildlife were long thought to have been extinct by this point,” added Professor Eleanor Scerri, a geographer at the Max Planck Institute and a researcher at the University of Malta.
“They were hunting and cooking red deer with turtles and birds.
In addition to this, scientists have found clear evidence regarding the exploitation of marine resources.
“We found that seals, groupers, thousands of edible marine gastropods, crabs and sea urchin debris all cooked undoubtedly,” said Dr. James Brinkhorn, a geography researcher at the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute.
“The diverse range of terrestrial areas, particularly the incorporation of the ocean fauna into their diet, have enabled these hunter-gatherers to maintain themselves on an island as small as Malta,” Dr. Stewart said.
These findings raised questions about the extinction of endemic animals in Malta and other small Mediterranean islands, and whether distant Messium Age communities are linked through seafarers.
“The results add a millennium to Maltese prehistoric times and enforce a reassessment of the capabilities of Europe’s last hunter-gatherer sailors, and its connections and ecological impacts,” Professor Scerri said.
Team’s paper It was published in the journal today Nature.
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EML Scerri et al. The marine voyage of hunter-gatherers has been extended to remote Mediterranean islands. NaturePublished online on April 9, 2025. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08780-y
Source: www.sci.news
