Years ago, when archaeologists 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. Crypto Archaeology.
The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans. The orthodoxy, until pretty recently, was that you did not have seafarers until the early Bronze Age. Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It's a pretty stunning change.
Scholars long thought that the capability to construct a watercraft and then navigate it to a distant coast, arrived only with the 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 2,500 B.C.E.
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 miles 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, traditional archaeologists claim ancient 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 archeologists 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. 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 Homo erectus, and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals, as well.
Recent finds in the Ionian and Aegean seas, suggest that early modern humans and Neandertals may have voyaged to remote islands before 130,000 years ago.
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, 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, traditional archaeologists were skeptical.
