Thousands of years before the invention of compasses or sails, prehistoric peoples crossed oceans to reach remote lands like Malta and Australia. Doing so meant striking out in unknowable conditions. What do such crossings tell us about ancient minds?

At a stroke, this extends the human occupation of Malta by over 1000 years. But more importantly, these people were not only alive in the Stone Age; they were also hunter-gatherers, as opposed to people from farming communities with more advanced tools. Archaeologists had often assumed that hunter-gatherers didn’t cross wide spans of ocean. Scerri’s team showed otherwise.

    • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      This was an important period in Eurasian prehistory. Modern humans had been living in Eurasia for tens of thousands of years, always as hunter-gatherers. But in a few regions, like the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, some groups started farming: they grew crops like wheat and kept domesticated animals like cows. These populations were spreading rapidly, and the farming lifestyle was replacing hunting and gathering. Later, farming communities would develop other innovations like writing, organised religion and empires.

      Almost all the early boats found were associated with farming communities; the Pesse canoe is the only one that predates agriculture. So, it has been tempting for archaeologists to assume that hunter-gatherers couldn’t or didn’t make boats, and therefore didn’t cross wide bodies of water. Seafaring, they concluded, was a more modern occupation.

      That has all changed in the past 20 years.