The realm of the ancient mariners

The oldest established early marine travel anywhere was the sea-crossing migration of anatomically modern Homo sapiens to Australia,beginning about 60,000 years ago. There is also a suggestive trickle of evidence,notably the skeletons and artefacts on the Indonesian island of Flores,of more ancient hominids making their way by water to new habitats.

Even more intriguing,the archaeologists who found the tools on Crete noted that the style of the hand axes suggested that they could be up to 700,000 years old. That may be a stretch,they conceded,but the tools resemble artefacts from the stone technology known as Acheulean,which originated with prehuman populations in Africa.

More than 2,000 stone artefacts,including the hand axes,were collected on the southwestern shore of Crete,near the town of Plakias,by a team led by Thomas F. Strasser and Eleni Panagopoulou. She is with the Greek Ministry of Culture and he is an associate professor of art history at Providence College in Rhode Island. They were assisted by Greek and American geologists and archaeologists,including Curtis Runnels of Boston University.

Strasser described the discovery last month at a meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America. A formal report has been accepted for publication in Hesparia,the journal of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

The Plakias survey team went in looking for material remains of more recent artisans,nothing older than 11,000 years. Such artefacts would have been blades,spear points and arrowheads typical of Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. “We found those,then we found the hand axes,” Strasser said,and that sent the team into deeper time. “We were flummoxed,” Runnels said. “These things were just not supposed to be there.”

Ofer Bar-Yosef,an authority on Stone Age archaeology at Harvard,said the significance of the find would depend on the dating of the site. “Once the investigators provide the dates,” he said,“we will have a better understanding of the discovery.”

Runnels,who has 30 years’ experience in Stone Age research,said that an analysis by him and three geologists “left not much doubt of the age of the site,and the tools must be even older”.

The cliffs and caves above the shore,the researchers said,have been uplifted by tectonic forces where the African plate goes under and pushes up the European plate. The exposed uplifted layers represent the sequence of geologic periods that have been well studied and dated,in some cases correlated to established dates of glacial and interglacial periods of the most recent ice age. In addition,the team analysed the layer bearing the tools and found the soil had been on the surface 130,000 to 190,000 years ago.

Runnels said he considered this a minimum age for the tools themselves. They include not only quartz hand axes,but also cleavers and scrapers,all of which are in the Acheulean style. Further explorations are planned this summer.

The 130,000-year date would put the discovery in a time when Homo sapiens had evolved in Africa,sometime after 200,000 years ago. Their presence in Europe did not become apparent until about 50,000 years ago.

Archaeologists can only speculate about who the toolmakers were. One hundred and thirty thousand years ago,modern humans shared the world with other hominids,like Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis. The Acheulean culture is thought to have started with Homo erectus. The standard hypothesis had been that Acheulean toolmakers reached Europe and Asia via the Middle East,passing mainly through what is now Turkey into the Balkans. The new finds suggest that their dispersals were not confined to land routes. They may lend credibility to proposals of migrations from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. Crete’s southern shore where the tools were found is 200 miles from North Africa.

“We can’t say the toolmakers came 200 miles from Libya,” Strasser said. “If you’re on a raft,that’s a long voyage,but they might have come from the European mainland by way of shorter crossings through Greek islands.” But archaeologists and nautical history experts said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artefacts.