Ancient Humans May Have Sailed The Mediterranean 450,000 Years Ago

HUMANS
20 December 2022
By MICHELLE STARR



A boat approaching a small island in the Aegean Sea. (George Pachantouris/Moment/Getty Images)
Archaic humans may have worked out how to sail across the sea to new lands as far back as nearly half a million years ago.

According to a new analysis of shorelines during the mid-Chibanian age, there's no other way these ancient hominins could have reached what we now call the Aegean Islands. Yet archaeologists have found ancient artifacts on the islands that pre-date the earliest known appearance of Homo sapiens.

This suggests that these ancient humans must have found a way to traverse large bodies of water. And if reliance on land bridges was not necessary for human migration, it may have implications for the way our ancestors and modern humans spread throughout the world.

The question of when hominins began sea-faring is difficult to answer. Boats throughout history tend to be made of wood, a material that doesn't often survive the ravages of time intact – and certainly not for tens of thousands, never mind hundreds of thousands of years. So there's no hope of a record of the first boats skimming across the oceans.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-humans-may-have-sailed-the-mediterranean-450000-years-ago