Despite popular belief that Stone Age humans weren’t particularly into maritime activities, new evidence has demonstrated that they were able to cross the Mediterranean Sea, navigating its waters between Europe and North Africa in wooden vessels.
Indeed, the first genomic study of ancient people from the eastern Maghreb region – present-day Tunisia and northeastern Algeria – has shown that Stone Age populations who lived there over 8,000 years ago, partly descended from European hunter-gatherers, according to the discovery reported in Nature on March 12.
This represents the first concrete evidence of trans-Mediterranean seafaring in this period, although archeological findings have pointed to some sort of cultural exchange between European and North African hunter-gatherers.
Although researchers have used ancient genomes to map the emergence of agriculture in the Middle East 12,000 years ago and its expansion to Europe, they haven’t focused on the southern Mediterranean until now. According to David Reich, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who co-led the study:
“There’s not been much of a North African story. (…) It was a huge hole.”
Results of the study
Specifically, Reich’s team worked together with researchers in Algeria, Tunisia, and Europe to sequence DNA from the bones or teeth of nine individuals who lived between 6,000 and over 10,000 years ago, uncovered in eastern Maghreb archeological sites.
In their analyses, they discovered that about 6% of DNA from a man unearthed from a Tunisian site called Djebba could trace back to European hunter-gatherers, and the researchers believe that his Maghrebi ancestors mixed with European hunter-gatherers about 8,500 years ago.
As for the specific source of the man’s European ancestry, the scientists are considering two possibilities – Sicily, several hundred kilometers from the coast of Tunisia, and smaller isles between the two continents. Obsidian from one of these islands, Pantelleria, found its way to Tunisian archeological sites.
Presumably, hunter-gatherers from Europe and North America traversed the Sicilian Strait in long wooden canoes, navigating from one island to another by sight. They probably would have made stopovers along the way, but these are now underwater, according to study co-author Giulio Lucarini, an archaeologist specializing in Africa at Italy’s National Research Council Institute of Heritage Science in Rome.
When was the Paleolithic era in Europe?
According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the period of human activity to the end of the last major Pleistocene glaciation termed the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age), lasted between 3.3 million and 11,700 years ago, after which it transcended into the Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), the date of which varies geographically by several thousand years.
The Mesolithic was followed by the Neolithic (New Stone Age), marked by a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favor of a broader hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the development of more complex and smaller lithic tools and weapons than the heavy-chipped equivalents of the Paleolithic. It lasted roughly between 15,000 to 5,000 ago.
When did the Neolithic Age start in Europe?
Although the duration of the Neolithic varies from region to region, in southeast Europe, it lasted approximately between 7,000 BC and 3,000 BC, while in parts of Northwest Europe, it ranged from 4,500 BC to 1,700 BC. The Neolithic was marked by the development of farming.
Turns out, studying human genes isn’t just great for learning about our ancestors’ migrations, but also holds promise in treating certain health conditions, such as obesity, and laboratory analyses have identified a genealogical setup that makes it difficult for both humans and Labradors to lose weight.
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