Archaic humans may have worked out how to sail across the sea to new lands as far back as nearly half a million years ago.
This suggests that these ancient humans must have found a way to traverse large bodies of water. And if reliance on land bridges was not necessary for human migration, it may have implications for the way our ancestors and modern humans spread throughout the world.
Instead, what we have is a record of artifacts and bones that have survived – stone tools that don't decay, for instance – and analysis tools that allow us to reconstruct the way the world has changed over many millennia. Led by geologist George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece, this is how a team of researchers were able to conduct the new analysis.
These ancient tools on Lesbos, Milos, and Naxos, moreover, have been linked to the Acheulean style developed some 1.76 million years ago, associated withacross Africa and Asia. Several such tools have been found in Turkey, Greece, and Crete dating back to 1.2 million years ago, so their appearance in the nearby archipelago does make some sense.
To determine whether this is a possibility, Ferentinos and his colleagues reconstructed the geography of the region, including a reconstruction of the shoreline around the Aegean Islands dating back to 450,000 years ago. For this, they used ancient river deltas, which can be used to infer sea level, and rates of subsidence driven by tectonic activity.
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