Stone-age hunters crossed the Mediterranean, study finds

Even 8500 years ago, hunters and collectors could have come to Malta on boats, bringing the skills of these pioneers into a new light.

Early Humans Likely Used Dugout Canoes to Travel the Open Sea 8,500 Years Ago

Learn how early humans made the 60-mile crossing from Europe to Malta, navigating at least partially by stars.

Mediterranean hunter gatherers navigated long-distance sea journeys well before the first farmers

Evidence shows that hunter-gatherers were crossing at least 100 kilometers (km) of open water to reach the Mediterranean island of Malta 8,500 years ago, a thousand years before the arrival of the first farmers.

Hunter-gatherers made long distance-crossings of Mediterranean in boats

Evidence of human activity has been found in caves in Malta dating back 8,500 years

Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands

The Maltese archipelago is a small island chain that is among the most remote in the Mediterranean. Humans were not thought to have reached and inhabited such small and isolated islands until the regional shift to Neolithic lifeways, around 7.5 thousand years ago (ka)1. In the standard view, the limited resources and ecological vulnerabilities of small islands, coupled with the technological challenges of long-distance seafaring, meant that hunt…

Humans made 60-mile sea crossings in canoes 8,000 years ago

A new study found early Mediterranean hunter-gatherers navigated long-distance sea journeys.