Sailing on the Prehistoric Mediterranean
European foragers in North Africa & Malta, Mesolithic seafaring
One of the first pieces I ever wrote on this blog was about Palaeolithic seafaring, a topic which easily captures the imagination and is still underappreciated.
Some of the oldest pieces of circumstantial evidence date right back into our deepest human past:
Stone tools found on the Arabian island of Socotra (circa 1 million years ago)
Human settlements between Borneo, New Guinea and Australia dating to between 70-15,000 years ago
Just recently there have been two papers published looking at Holocene era sea travel around the Mediterranean. These are - High continuity of forager ancestry in the Neolithic period of the eastern Maghreb (2025) and Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands (2025). In these publications the authors present the surprising conclusions that European hunter-gatherers (also known as Western Hunter-Gatherers) made it to Malta around 8,500 years ago, and to Tunisia around 8,000 years ago.
The Maltese evidence comes from a combination of discoveries at a site called Latnija. The map below shows the details.
It would present even today a perfect site for people to camp out and forage, with nearby freshwater sources and easy access to the shoreline. Around 65 stone tools were recovered, which were almost all made from limestone, and were consequently quite simple and expedient - reflecting newly arrived people making use of local stone supplies. Animal remains - the majority red deer, but also turtles, crabs, thousands of shells, fish, seals, birds and sea urchins - reflect a mixed hunting and gathering strategy from both land and sea. I wonder how easy it was to harvest the deer, since any indigenous fauna presumably had never encountered people before. Plant foods are always harder to identify, but seeds and charred remains point to wild grasses and palms, potentially indicating both food sources and plant fibres for cord, basketry and similar necessities. All these finds were dated to between 8.5 and 7.5 thousand years ago, which places this colonisation at around the period when Neolithic farmers from Anatolia were moving into the Mediterranean and the Balkans. The authors do speculate that foragers moving outwards to remote islands might have been instigated by this disruption.
The motivation for these long sea crossings remains ambiguous. It might be that movement to Malta was driven by the availability of (perhaps seasonal) subsistence resources, catalysed by the slightly improved climate of the Early Holocene. It is also possible that the Maltese Mesolithic reflects social rather than environmental factors; namely, the potential regional demographic shockwaves through hunter-gatherer societies associated with the transition to the Neolithic in the Mediterranean
Evidence for the physical sailing vessels has been lost to time, but Mesolithic people are believed to have used forms of dugout canoes such as those found in Denmark. Skin-lined kayaks could also have been used but we have no evidence for them, perhaps due to preservation issues. The route to Malta is not easy using simple craft like these.
The earliest Mesolithic arrivals on what we presume were dugout canoes, date to a time when Malta had almost reached its current configuration, which today has a minimum straight-line distance of around 85 km to Sicily34,35. However, sea surface currents and prevailing winds, as well as the use of landmarks, stars and other wayfinding practices, mean that the distances traversed by hunter-gatherers to Malta could have been considerably longer, and a crossing of about 100 km has been proposed for the Neolithic36,37,38,39. In particular, any crossing from Sicily to Malta would have had to contend with the ocean current dynamics in the Malta Channel40. Experimental voyages on a replica of an Early Neolithic dug-out canoe from La Marmotta (Italy) suggest that crossings of 50 km could be accomplished at a speed of about 4 km h−1 (just over 2 knots)41, implying an outward summer sea journey that would have necessitated all daylight hours and an additional 8 h of darkness.
The scenario painted here requires dedicated crew-members, supported by communities on land, who have the skill and experience to sail out into the sea all day and much of the night. Initial attempts to locate Malta must have required many Polynesian-esque voyages of discovery without certainty that they would come back. Perhaps birds or beached animals or some other clue pointed to Malta from the shore?
Just as extraordinary perhaps is the second set of revelations, that these same hunter-gatherers not only made it to Malta, but all the way to North Africa.
The two sampled individuals from Djebba (Tunisia, Late Capsian) and one from ABR (Algeria, Iberomaurusian) share a similar genetic composition as contemporaneous groups from the western Maghreb1,2,3, revealing that this ‘Maghrebi’ ancestry had a wide geographic and temporal extent. Unlike in the west, however, in the eastern Maghreb, we found evidence of admixture from Western European hunter–gatherers at Djebba, with the geographic proximity to Sicily suggesting a likely route. Shared technical innovations in material culture between these two regions, such as the pressure technique13,20 that started in the eastern Maghreb from at least around 8,500–8,400 calibrated (cal.) years bp, and the movements of raw materials, such as the Pantellerian obsidian found in the eastern Maghreb from around 8,000 cal. years bp9,13, document extensive seafaring across the Strait of Sicily during this period. These cultural interactions appear to have been accompanied by the movement of hunter–gatherers, at least from north to south, and possibly in both directions.
This conclusion is based on testing the genomes of nine sets of recovered human remains from North Africa, spanning the end of the Ice Age to the advent of farming. While most show deep population roots in the local Maghrebi hunter-gatherer pool, one person from Djebba in Tunisia displayed a small amount European hunter-gatherer ancestry.
The small contribution of the European (WHG) ancestry lines up with the previous dating for the voyage to Malta - around 8,000 years ago. As mentioned in the above quote - raw materials and methods of stone tool production were also shared between Sicily and North Africa at this time - making it all but certain that European and perhaps North African foragers were sailing around the Mediterranean.
We should note that this result was only found in one individual, and that the tools used to establish WHG ancestry could also point to some other WHG-related population - like perhaps some other group occupying Sicily at that time. Western Hunter-Gatherer as a group stretches across huge amounts of time and space, and there may have been more local complications than this study is aware of. Nevertheless, added to the Malta paper above, we have a nice narrative developing here, of European foragers travelling across the Med, making contacts with North African foragers. What their relationship was like is totally unknown, but hopefully papers like these will start to open up new possibilities of European forager seafaring, including:
Did European foragers practice deep-sea fishing or even whaling?
How interconnected were these forager communities?
Did the WHGs teach or influence the incoming Neolithic farmers about boats, navigation, tides and currents? Or did they have to learn from scratch?
We have some evidence for foragers moving animals across the water (Ireland), how responsible were these hunter-gatherers for spreading flora and fauna around Europe’s islands?
I may return to that last point another time, the story of how hunter-gatherers likely populated Ireland with wild boar, and maybe other animals too!
Thank you for this article!