Ancient Humans Sailed the Seas as Early as Half a Million Years Ago: Study

Kos Temenes
By Kos Temenes
December 21, 2022Science & Tech
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Ancient Humans Sailed the Seas as Early as Half a Million Years Ago: Study
Historical map depicting the northern shores of the Aegean Islands. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The idea that humans sailed the seas hundreds of thousands of years ago no longer seems that far-fetched. A new coastal analysis claims that they did, based on ancient artifacts Greek archaeologists discovered on the Aegean Islands.

The study published in Nature suggests that ancient humans must have found ways to travel over large regions of ocean and sheds new light on how ancient humans spread across the world.

It’s highly unlikely that ancient record-keeping would detail ocean exploration, making the question of when the ancients started seafaring hard to answer, especially because boats were made from wood, a material that decomposes and erodes with time and therefore not likely to have been kept intact.

However, records of non-decaying artifacts, such as stone tools and bones, give an indication of what changes the world has undergone over hundreds of millennia. The study, spearheaded by geologist George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece, shows in detail how the analysis was able to be conducted.

The Aegean islands are located between Greece and Turkey. Considered to be some of the most magnificent places on earth, they consist of hundreds of islands that make up an archipelago that has been inhabited for a vast amount of time, with some artifacts having been dated back to as early as 476,000 years ago.

The tools on the neighboring islands of Lesbos, Milos, and Naxos, have nonetheless been linked to the Acheulean style. These date back to over 1.7 million years ago. Given that several of these tools were found in nearby Turkey, as well as Greece, dating back to 1.2 million years ago, their discovery on the archipelago seems logical.

But according to previous studies, humans were only able to cross the islands during ice ages, on foot, as areas that would normally be covered by water, would become accessible.

A process of reconstructing the area’s coastal lines allowed Ferentinos and his team to measure the water level at the shorelines across the Aegean islands dating back 450,000 years. Ancient river deltas were used in the process to ascertain sea levels and subsidence rates based on tectonic activity.

This led them to the conclusion that the previous studies were incorrect. Their study affirmed a lower water level, its lowest point being approximately 225 meters (738 feet) lower than today, indicating that the islands have remained consistently insular from the surrounding land masses, with even at its lowest point being separated by large swaths of ocean.

According to researchers, this was definitely not the earliest sea crossing globally. Ancient mankind is thought to have traversed the straits of the Indo-Pacific, around Indonesia and the Philippines, going back as far as between 700,000 and a million years ago.

This suggests that skilled sea travel was known to human ancestors.

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