Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
nature.com120 points by gmays 2 months ago
120 points by gmays 2 months ago
> Many potential stopovers are now submerged
If I was a billionaire, I'd look into funding tech for excavating coastlines during the ice age(s), That's where any 10k old civilizations must have been.
It's like the old joke about the drunk who's searching for his lost keys under a streetlight because the light is better there. Archaeologists have barely begun to excavate underwater sites where people lived back when sea levels were much lower. There is surely much to discover but doing anything underwater increases the cost by at least 10×.
Take a look at Doggerland. It's been known for over 100 years with no lack of interest, but as you say, underwater archaeology is expensive and technically difficult.
And it's not like there is much to find, most of the things people in Doggerland made were out of wood, there are no ancient stone ruins or lost treasures.
There may be no grand objects to be found, but that does not mean there isn't much to find. The thing that we will find is more knowledge about those societies.
I think it’s more about the cost and complexity of finding anything than trying to somehow imply that the societies living there were inferior.
We already know relatively little about Neolithic Europe despite there being major cities there that rivaled or eclipsed those in Mesopotamia in population. Yet we hardly know anything about them in comparison because they used perishable materials for almost everything (and it’s not only because of writing). Finding anything useful underwater makes that many times harder.
> We already know relatively little about Neolithic Europe despite there being major cities there that rivaled or eclipsed those in Mesopotamia in population.
What are you referring to? I could certainly imagine such a thing but I can't say I've ever heard of someone finding evidence of a city that matches this description.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Europe_(archaeology)
e.g. Maidanetske site could have had 20-40k inhabitants. Uruk possibly only reached that population centuries later.
But of course accurate estimates of this and other similar sites are very tricky.
You want to find ancient marvels? Start digging literally anywhere in or around Rome. Or half of amazon jungle. Or around London. And so on. You can get much more 'value' in form of artifacts and knowledge from there for given money.
Submerged places... imagine how complex and slow archaeologic excavations look on the ground. Now move it 50m underwater in endless mud. Good luck looking for literal needle in the muddy haystack of 40,000km2. To find what... some fossilized wood or few arrow heads? That culture was very similar to ones on neighboring lands, no atlantis there.
One day, robots can scan and dig through there but there are so many better ways to spending money, any money, that it makes perfect sense nobody is doing it.
It's a question of timelines. While I agree with Amazon, we know pretty well the periods in which Rome and London have been inhabited, but the question is more about understanding pre ice-age human settlements, of which we know nothing about because these are more likely submerged now.
How can we know that without excavating?
Treasures are small and rare enough so you can never rule them out completely, but if there were significant amounts of rocks there, we would know because Doggerland has been fairly thoroughly “ploughed” by fishing trawlers and mapped for research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland#Discovery_and_inves...)
The geology of the North Sea also indicates “sand” more than “rocks”.
Period, trade - archaeology is but one discipline. How could we track and plan our excavation without writing a to-do/kanban app?
>here are no ancient stone ruins or lost treasures.
Like Stonehenge? How can we possibly know what's there without looking thoroughly?
Because it's highly unlikely given the evidence we have? Is there any reason to believe that material culture in Doggerland could have been fundamentally different to that of other hunter gatherer societies in Europe at the time?
There is a 4000-5000 year gap between Doggerland sinking and Stonehenge i.e. similar to that of Stonehenge being built and our days so it's hardly relevant.
>Is there any reason to believe that material culture in Doggerland could have been fundamentally different to that of other hunter gatherer societies in Europe at the time?
>There is a 4000-5000 year gap between Doggerland sinking and Stonehenge i.e. similar to that of Stonehenge being built and our days so it's hardly relevant
Göbeklitepe was built 5000 years before Stonehenge so I think it is very relevant. It is absurd to suggest that we know for certain what is there without even looking.
> It is absurd
It's not if we base it on evidence that we have. It's silly to assume otherwise until any evidence at all is discovered. Why would Doggerland be fundamentally different to the surrounding areas which are at a higher altitude?
> Göbeklitepe
If there were major stone structures at the bottom of the sea we would have very likely found them already.
Also.. I'm not even trying to imply that there weren't any complex societies in Doggerland (of course it's extremely likely that there weren't) but they would have likely primarily used wood to construct structures due to obvious reasons and any remains would have been very unlikely to survive.
IMHO associating "monumental" architecture or remains with complex societies and "civilization" is flawed. Just consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidanetske
There's a similar case to be made for the Pacific Northwest - there's likely a good chunk of human history beneath Puget Sound and the Pacific.
https://www.cascadepbs.org/2011/05/lost-civilization-along-w...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911...
This sea level hinge idea points towards an area to look that didn't get pushed underwater. As far as I have read people are looking and finding signs of humans. The north end of Vancouver island and the Brooks peninsula also may have stayed glacier free during the ice age.
Doggerland is probably full of possible archaeological evidence, but it's now submerged. Fishing vessels occasionally haul up a mammoth tusk. Or even a whole mammoth skull with tusks attached.
The Persian Gulf would be a goldmine for this.
Surprisingly the Persian Gulf is likely the exact opposite scenario. Modern research suggests that ancient likes like Ur were likely on the coastline while modern Basra would have been totally submerged. In most of the world the post glacial trend has pushed the coastline in but in the Persian gulf the trend points the other way. There is the possibility that the reason that Iraq is such a gold mine for archeological sites is because it is one of the rare places where the sea went the other way.
I think we are undercounting how much silt gets deposited by major river systems over millenia. The ruins of Lothal, which was a Harappan port city contemporary with Ur are pretty far inland as well. Who knows? Maybe Giza was closer to the coast and was part of a major Nilotic coastal metropolis
Persian gulf is just silt being deposited increasing the coastlines. Plenty of other river systems are doing that too.
No need for boat during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. This seems to imply once the water started taking over, eyesight navigation was the way.
There weren’t anatomically modern humans the last time the straits of Gibraltar reopened 5.33 MYA.
How does DNA show they traveled by sea?
The remains found in modern Tunisia shared genes with people in what is now Morocco and Spain. It’s more likely they paddled than walked the long way around.
I'd say the case was probable, but it's still speculation.
I'm glad I'm not an archaeologist. They are faced with very little evidence, and of course try to extend it as far as possible. And then a new discovery throws that under the bus.
Sometimes, you just take by far the most logical conclusion and go with it. Like here - sure, they could have gone around via Turkey on some ridiculous super long trip, crossing various cultures not always open to foreigners while leaving no proofs about it. Or just cross the sea, its not that far and sea faring was one of the first skills mankind learned, over much greater distances and rougher seas than Mediterranean.
Or maybe:
1. they built a boat and rowed across
2. they banished Thag who had dallied with the King Oog's lady, who then wandered following the shore and a year later was in Spain. Thag was popular with the ladies, and had many descendants
3. through human brownian motion over a century, some wound up in Spain
The dna shows the migration pattern, and the migration pattern is only compatible with sea travel
Ex-pats not immigrants.
Wasn’t the water level lower back then? How much smaller was the Mediterranean?
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Could the legend of Atlantis just been a reference to early European sailors visiting North Africa, across the Mediterranean?
No. Plato's Atlantis is mentioned as being past the pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic
Pillars of Hercules name itself is ambiguous, one of the theories is that Plato referred to a pair of Greek islands, not Gibraltar. That would place Atlantis somewhere in the Mediterrain Sea.
The source has Ἡρακλέους στήλας. Wiktionary tells me that's more like blocks of Heracles, or slabs or monuments.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... (press "focus" to swap language)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B...
It's kind of completely unambiguous though, given all the details:
> from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean,
> the ocean there was at that time navigable;
> in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,'
The location is clearly out in the unnavigable Atlantic, and the [whatever] of Heracles form a mouth.
Well given that the story of Atlantis is quite clearly allegorical, probably not.
Although there probably was some sort of maritime link from Greece to beyond Gibraltar, the link to the Atlantis myth seems rather tenuous and moreover, isn't needed to explain where Platon got the idea for this ancient thalassocracy since he of course lived in Athens when they were doing similar stuff with the Delian League.
> Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could have traversed the Sicilian Strait in long wooden canoes, navigating from island to island by sight. Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard to find further evidence for these voyages, Lucarini adds.
The title is misleading.
You could also cross in a raft. Or on a log. You can swim across (riskily, quite riskily) at the straight of gibraltar itself. We've known humans have been seafaring tens of thousands of years before our earliest archaeological evidence (although dugout canoes are likely just as old, it's very bad conditions for preservation outside of stuff like northern european bogs/the dead sea, and they often just look like logs underwater, not boats)—at no point has Australia been fully connected to continental asia. Hell, this is true for H Erectus, let alone h s sapiens—it's not difficult to believe H Erectus might have pieced together how to lash logs together.
On articles like this, I strongly recommend just ignoring the title. It's enough to make anyone with a mild background in the subject frustrated. The research itself remains incredibly interesting.
It's still a sea, even if you stay within sight of land.
> Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard to find further evidence for these voyages
What’s your point?
I’m so sorry, I don’t understand the disconnect.
> Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could have traversed
“May” and “could have” aren’t meaningful, and the quotes ends with additional ambiguity.
You're interpreting 'could have' as a possibility when it can also be interpreted as a statement of capability.
- Evidence X, Y, Z points to a European origin for these discoveries.
- How could Europeans have got to North Africa so long ago?
- They could have done it by island hopping.
I don’t see the problem. They’re making a claim and have some evidence. That of course doesn’t mean they’re actually correct, but that’s their claim.
The story that civilization started 5-6000 years ago in Mesopotamia is pretty quickly eroding away. It’s interesting to see all the new evidence for advanced technology existing much earlier than expected.
Sounds like they canoed across the narrow Straight of Gibralter with a burned out log canoe (or they put a suggestive image of it in there anyway). Hundreds of people have swum across the Straight of Gibralter, I don't think this is showing emergence of civilization necessarily if it was swimming or canoeing.