Posted on 05/05/2018 9:08:13 PM PDT by Theoria
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Odysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer’s epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.
The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. “The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don’t have seafarers until the early Bronze Age,” adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. “Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It’s a pretty stunning change.”
Scholars long thought that the capability to construct and victual a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast arrived only with advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The earliest known boat, found in the Netherlands, dates back only 10,000 years or so, and convincing evidence of sails only show up in Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C.E. Not until 2000 B.C.E. is there physical evidence that sailors crossed the open ocean, from India to Arabia.
But a growing inventory of stone tools and the occasional bone scattered across Eurasia tells a radically different story. (Wooden boats and paddles don’t typically survive the ages.) Early members of the human family such as Homo erectus are now known to have crossed several kilometers of deep water more than a million years ago in Indonesia, to islands such as Flores and Sulawesi. Modern humans braved treacherous waters to reach Australia by 65,000 years ago. But in both cases, some archaeologists say early seafarers might have embarked by accident, perhaps swept out to sea by tsunamis.
In contrast, the recent evidence from the Mediterranean suggests purposeful navigation. Archaeologists had long noted ancient-looking stone tools on several Mediterranean islands including Crete, which has been an island for more than 5 million years, but they were dismissed as oddities.
Then in 2008 and 2009, Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island co-led a Greek-U.S. team with archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University and discovered hundreds of stone tools near the southern coastal village of Plakias. The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. The tools also offered a clue to the identity of the early seafarers: The artifacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals as well.
Strasser argued that the tools may represent a sea-borne migration of Neandertals from the Near East to Europe. The team used a variety of techniques to date the soil around the tools to at least 130,000 years old, but they could not pinpoint a more exact date. And the stratigraphy at the site is unclear, raising questions about whether the artifacts are as old as the soil they were embedded in. So other archaeologists were skeptical.
But the surprise discovery prompted researchers to scour the region for additional sites, an effort that is now bearing fruit. Possible Neandertal artifacts have turned up on a number of islands, including at Stelida on the island of Naxos. Naxos sits 250 kilometers north of Crete in the Aegean Sea; even during glacial times, when sea levels were lower, it was likely accessible only by watercraft. A Greek-Canadian team co-led by Tristan Carter of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, uncovered hundreds of tools embedded in the soil of a chert quarry. The hand axes and blades resemble the so-called Mousterian toolkit, which Neandertals and modern humans made from about 200,000 years ago until 50,000 years ago. These tools require a more sophisticated flaking method than Acheulean types do, including preparing a stone core before striking flakes off it.
Dating work on the artifacts is ongoing and Carter declined to comment pending publication. But Cherry says the Naxos evidence may be persuasive because it is well stratified, which means researchers should be able to date it more securely. “It is very convincing, because there are a lot more tools in situ,” adds Strasser, who, like Cherry, was not involved in the dig. “It is a quarry site littered with Mousterian stone tools.”
Other Paleolithic tools that appear to be Mousterian have been recovered on the western Ionian islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos. The plethora of sites adds weight to the idea of purposeful settlement. “People are going back and forth to islands much earlier than we thought,” Simmons says.
But determining which of today’s islands were truly islands tens of thousands of years ago isn’t easy, as it depends on local land movements as well as broader sea-level changes, says Nikos Efstratiou, an archaeologist at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. On the Aegean island of Lemnos, his team found what he thinks is a Paleolithic hunting camp dating back more than 10,000 years. But he can’t yet be sure when Lemnos was cut off from the mainland. Efstratiou adds that archaeologists need to better characterize the sorts of tools made on the mainland and the islands, so they can find links between the mainland and island peoples.
Other archaeologists are already reckoning with the possibility that humans and our cousins went to sea thousands of years earlier than had been thought. “We severely miscalculated,” admits Runnels, who excavated at the Crete site. If his colleagues are right, he says, “the seas were more permeable than we thought.”
I am 4% Neanderthal...nice!
Light eyes and light hair.
The civilizations you are referring to are the result of contact with non African peoples, way way way way late in the historical timeline.
Earlier in the historical timeline, there’s literally no sign of any kind of indigenous civilization anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
You have clearly confused North Africa and the cultures that have existed there since antiquity with sub-Saharan Africa where no such civilization is in evidence.
The civilization that you are referring to, the Songhai, was Arabic and not African in origin. Same goes for the Mali and Ghana empires.
Sub Saharan Africans by themselves created no civilization at all, ever. 100% of all civilization in SSA is foreign in origin.
Boating, so simple even a caveman can do it...
There’s boating and then there’s ocean voyaging. Going to a place you can see from where you are does not involve complex navigation skills. Getting to Crete can be done in primitive boats. The island of Antikythera is about 23 miles from the Greek mainland, and from there to Crete is another 20 miles.
I could see some early people seeing an island in the distance, using some vines to lash together some logs, and paddling over to take a look. Then seeing another island and deciding to visit there too.
No. Sub-Sahara is all that below coastal Northern Africa: Mauritania, Algeria, Libya, Egypt all the way south to South Africa, at least according to how geographical maps represent the continent. All the area that lies south of the Sahara, to be short, is Sub-Sahara. You should brush up on your geography.
There is no sign of the cities because they were made of wood and that decayed. However, history did record it - Please read the reference I gave. And if that is not enough then read Portuguese history. If that is not enough, then ... well ...
There were North African cultures that left remnants of themselves which the Portuguese in the 15th century discovered. There is no confusion in the history books, only in so-called “common knowledge of history”.
I made no direct reference to Songhai. What I refer to are pre-Islamic and pre-Christian societies, believed to have been founded by “white men from the North” who came from the north, from the desert, and from the Nile Valley. Songhai Empire was mostly interior below Libya and Algeria and had only a small connection to the coast.
But you are welcome to your ideas of history and geography.
What you’re not grasping here is the timeline of events.
The empires you reference come long long long after non-African peoples began to explore and colonize SSA.
But before this non-African colonization period - i.e. before 0AD, give or take a couple hundred years - there’s nothing. Zero. Zilch.
No organized society of any kind. No technology, not even the wheel. No seafaring. No alphabet, no mathematics, no calendars, no metal-working.
The occurrence of ALL technology and ALL organized society in SSA dates to after these technologies were brought there by non-Africans.
What the Portuguese encountered was an Arabian civilization established in West Africa. That civilization was not indigenous at all - it was imported from outside Africa, as has all civilization that has ever been known to occur in SSA.
Whatever.
You are aware that whatever may be found to suggest ancient seagoing only survives on what were once the highlands of a once much larger world in terms of land areas once available?
So, on two levels there is a problem with your confidence: first all the best evidence that may exist (or may have existed) is likely under even hundreds of feet of water; second since we ARE talking highlands of that lost world here, even though today they may be lowlands, there was ample time for cultures to arise that were suited to being just where they are.
Just as the cultures of the Eastern Europe and Asian steppes lack a history of using boats — like the Slavs before the Rus came they may have a landbound attitude because that’s just their conventional thinking, and even the Rus, Varangian/Viking derived as they were, absorbed that attitude until Peter pulled them out of it — so one cannot say they lacked ability just because they didn’t do A or B.
I would also point out to you that Sub Saharan Africa, under the effects of Islam, suffered a general devastation of many cultures and Mali notably got rich and fat shipping out other Africans across the desert to Arab lands. Some folks say, and not incorrectly, that Islam with the destruction and loss of North Africa as well as endless piracy and many slave raids caused the dark ages but compared to what happened to the classical worlds the tribal lands or small kingdoms that once were scattered around Africa really got hammered ... and the wilderness took everything once people were gone.
True story: years ago after I first heard of the idea that there was a issue with the generally accepted timeline of Egyptgiven the evidence, for example, that a tomb of an earlier dynasty individual had been built on top of the tomb of a later (and thus it was suggested that for at least several hundred years Egypt may have had two different capitals) I happened to encounter an old professor of mine, an archaeologist, and told him of the idea.
His reaction was not wow, that interesting and there might be some real work inspired to test the theory but was instead literally that it would mess everything up.
Now, maybe “mess up” was his way of saying the former, but it doesn’t seem like it would be.
Good catch.
I was wondering how many times the dudes oar broke. Looks like it’s made out of a swizzle stick
Neanderthal flight. They heard about homo sapiens coming up from Africa and knew what that would do for property values.
Muslims had been slaving out of Africa well before then. Certainly with the rise of the Mali.
Incidentally, the reason there are all those world heritage ruins of classical cities and towns in North Africa is precisely because of Islam and the depopulation of so many areas, replacing agriculture with herding.
Not many folks were around to need the stone to recycle it so they remained.
Aside: I dream of building my own boat ... it will nicely cement my has no life status.
This is getting too confusing. The Portuguese did not meet muslims during their explorations. Muslims came later to that particular area.
“Sub Saharan Africans by themselves created no civilization at all, ever. 100% of all civilization in SSA is foreign in origin.”
***********
But what about WAKANDA?!!!!!!
About wood construction....
Also a great point!
I’ve made the same point to folks who want to portray ancient Europe as all bumpkins and rubes because Egypt and Eythopia had stone buildings.
The muslims salted the farms of North Africa and used goats to eat the vegetation and in doing so turned the grain belt of the ancient world into semi-arid desert.
There are no people there because it is now an inhospitable place to live, as well as being virtually lawless.
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