Tools point to early Cretan arrivals

[Bloodwraith]

January 18, 2010
Tools point to early Cretan arrivals
Norman Hammond, Archaeology Correspondent

Evidence for the world’s earliest seafaring has emerged from an archaeological survey in Crete. Tools of Lower Palaeolithic type, at least 130,000 years old, have been found on the Greek island, which has been isolated by the Mediterranean Sea for at least the past five million years, so that any human ancestors must have arrived by boat. At this date, they would have been of a pre-modern species: the earliest Neanderthalers or even Homo heidelbergensis, the species to which Boxgrove Man belonged, are among possible contenders, but no such remains have so far been found on Crete.

“The early inhabitants of Crete reached the island using sea craft capable of open-sea navigation and multiple journeys — a finding that pushes the history of seafaring in the Mediterranean back by more than 100,000 years and has implications for the dispersal of early humans,” Professor Curtis Runnels said. The oldest uncontested marine crossing until recently was from Indonesia to Australia, dating to perhaps 60,000 years ago and made by anatomically modern humans of our own species, Homo sapiens, although we now know that earlier settlement on the island of Flores in Indonesia also necessitated a sea-crossing.

Professor Runnels, the Palaeolithic expert in the survey team, said that the investigation was carried out along the southwestern coast of Crete near the town of Plakias, facing Libya more than 200 miles to the south. These first Cretans may have crossed the Libyan Sea rather than island-hopping through the Cyclades from mainland Greece. Recent finds of what are claimed to be Palaeolithic tools from the island of Gavdos, off the south coast of Crete, would support this southern approach.

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The survey has focused on the area from Plakias to Ayios Pavlos, including the Preveli Gorge, and has recovered more than 2,000 stone artefacts from 28 sites; the early tools were found at nine of these, eight in the area between Plakias and Preveli. “The existence of Lower Palaeolithic artefacts in association with datable geological contexts was a complete surprise: until now there has been no certain evidence of Lower Palaeolithic seafaring in the Mediterranean,” Professor Runnels said.

Early human penetration of Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar at a much earlier Palaeolithic date has been proposed, on the basis of occupation at Atapuerca, near Burgos, dating to at least 1.3 million years ago. These first Europeans could also have come along the north side of the Mediterranean from Anatolia, via Greece and the Balkans, however. The impact of this Cretan evidence is to show that a sea-crossing by pre-modern humans from Morocco to Spain cannot be ruled out.

The Plakias survey team, headed by Dr Thomas Strasser, of Providence College in Rhode Island, and Dr Eleni Panagopoulou, of the Greek Ministry of Culture, and funded partly by the National Geographic Society, sought caves and rock shelters near the mouths of freshwater perennial streams and rivers emptying into the Libyan Sea and within five kilometres of the present coast. Because erosion has cut back many of these, the team sought artefacts on the slopes in front of their present entrances. Much of the material was found on old marine terraces up to 92 metres above modern sea level.

Up to 300 pieces were found at each of the early sites, and at five sites the geological context allowed an approximate date to be assigned. Professor Runnels considers his estimate of 130,000 years to be a minimum and cautions that the artefacts could be much older. The tools included handaxes, cleavers and scrapers, and the quartz rocks used were sufficiently abundant for tools to be discarded after only short periods of use.

What sort of water-craft might have been used remains a matter of speculation, but it seems that our forebears were forging their way across Homer’s “wine-dark sea” tens of millennia earlier than anybody had supposed.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/court_and_social/article6991643.ece