Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands(nature.com)
nature.com
Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08780-y
16 comments
I'm from Malta. It's dead center in the Mediterranean sea, just 60 miles off the coast of Sicily, and always has been a melting point of cultures from around the Mediterranean as a result. This is literally the first time in my life I've heard it described as remote.
60 miles off the coast during premodern times seems pretty remote to me. How long would that be on makeshift raft an oar? A days journey or longer with smooth seas?
The early European hunter-gatherers uses something like dugout canoes, and examples dating back 7k years have been found in Italy. Experienced paddlers with good wind and current conditions could cover 60 miles in about a day. The 90 miles form Sicily to Tunisia is also possible to cover in such a canoe, and DNA form skeletal remains does indeed show that people made the journey.
Roughly 40-60k years ago a similar length journey was likely made from Timor to Australia, fwiw.
For the very early history of the Med—geological to 500 BC—I found the book The Making of the Middle Sea by Cyprian Broodbank to be an interesting read; ToC:
> One: A Barbarian History • Two: Provocative Places • Three: The Speciating Sea (1.8 million – 50,000 years ago) • Four: A Cold Coming We Had of It (50,000 years ago – 10,000 BC) • Five: Brave New Worlds (10,000 –5500 BC) • Six: How It Might Have Been (5500 – 3500 BC) • Seven: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (3500 – 2200 BC) • Eight: Pomp and Circumstance (2200 – 1300 BC) • Nine: From Sea to Shining Sea (1300 – 800 BC) • Ten: The End of the Beginning (800 – 500 BC) • Eleven: De Profundis
* https://thamesandhudson.com/the-making-of-the-middle-sea-978...
* https://archive.org/details/makingofmiddlese0000broo
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian_Broodbank
> One: A Barbarian History • Two: Provocative Places • Three: The Speciating Sea (1.8 million – 50,000 years ago) • Four: A Cold Coming We Had of It (50,000 years ago – 10,000 BC) • Five: Brave New Worlds (10,000 –5500 BC) • Six: How It Might Have Been (5500 – 3500 BC) • Seven: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (3500 – 2200 BC) • Eight: Pomp and Circumstance (2200 – 1300 BC) • Nine: From Sea to Shining Sea (1300 – 800 BC) • Ten: The End of the Beginning (800 – 500 BC) • Eleven: De Profundis
* https://thamesandhudson.com/the-making-of-the-middle-sea-978...
* https://archive.org/details/makingofmiddlese0000broo
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian_Broodbank
Thanks, I read the book and yes it is interesting an with a well written narrative.
Unanswered (and probably unanswerable) question: Was it deliberate? Or did they get blown off course while trying to go somewhere much shorter, and wind up hitting Malta before they sank or hit somewhere else?
You can see Malta from Sicily if conditions are just right. There's zero chance the inhabitants didn't know there was something there, just a matter of time until someone decides to make the trip.
Or deliberately blown off to a random place.
"Gilgamesh's Island"
It's also exciting that their code to actually reproduce these is also available. https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta