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According to a Live Science report, European hunter-gatherers traversed the Mediterranean Sea in primitive boats and visited North Africa much earlier than previously thought. A new study sequenced the DNA from nine individuals who lived in modern-day Algeria and Tunisia between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. The surprising results revealed that some of them may have been descended from Mesolithic Europeans. The genome of one particular man buried at the site of Djebba in Tunisia indicated that at least six percent of his DNA could be traced back to European hunter-gatherers. These results suggest that the individual's local ancestors mixed...

In early August, underwater archaeologists excavating at Lake Bracciano, north of Rome (Italy), brought up a nine meter-long dugout canoe hewn from a massive oak trunk. Some 9,000 years old, buried under three meters of mud and eight meters of water, this was the fourth canoe excavated at a Neolithic colony discovered near the shores of Anguillara in 1989. Unique in Neolithic archaeology, no other sites have been discovered in central Italy, and never at the bottom of a lake. It is located in La Marmotta Bay, at the foot of Anguillara's promontory. Discovered under unusual circumstances in 1989, when...

ARCHEOLOGY: 8000 YEAR-OLD PIROGUE FOUND IN LAKE BRACCIANO (AGI) - Rome, Italy, Aug 1 - An 8,000 year-old pirogue was found in Lake Bracciano, in the area of the neolithic village La Marmotta. "It's an exceptional example of ancient ship engineering, which proves the advanced knowledge of the peoples who lived here in 6000 BC" say the archaeologists who made the discovery, of the Prehistoric Museum 'Luigi Pigorini' in ROme. More than 10m long, made out of a single oak trunk, the pirogue was still being made when it was abandoned for reasons we still don't know. It was found...