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Stone Tools Found On Crete Push Back Humans' Maritime History
The New York Times reports that stone tools discovered on the Greek island of Crete, and reported last month at an academic conference, are strong evidence for rethinking the maritime capabilities of early humans. The researchers who found the tools (hand-axes, cleavers, and scrapers) estimate them to be at least 130,000 years old; if they're right, humans have been traveling long distances at sea (Crete is 200 miles from the northern African coastline) for at least several tens of thousands of years longer than earlier believed.
Crete has been an island for more than five million years, meaning that the toolmakers must have arrived by boat. So this seems to push the history of Mediterranean voyaging back more than 100,000 years, specialists in Stone Age archaeology say.
There have been some pretty severe ice ages within the last million years when the sea levels were very low. For instance Japan used to be connected to Korea (and the Sea of Japan was a lake) only 18,000 years ago. Crete was probably really close to Greece back then too, maybe even connected.
To the untrained eye that is all they would appear, sure. I dont think the troll moderation was entirely fair - I would bet that a lot of readers looked at the photo at the top of that page and thought the same thing.
But, look for instance at the second piece from the right at the top of the story. Look at the top-left edge. See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone, that is a hand-axe or "chopper" which has been intelligently worked and shaped for a purpose.
The article is pretty crappy though (as is expected with "science reporting" unfortunately.) The commentary regarding early human sea-crossing capabilities is a bit... well... warped. Even though there is a throwaway mention of non-modern humans it is given no context and the rest of the text appears quite ignorant of it. The fourth paragraph is one big facepalm. It implies several times that this find somehow indicates a 200-mile crossing from Africa, when it does nothing of the sort. Given the loose dating (prior to 130kya by geological strata) it would seem quite likely that the ancient population who made these tools crossed at or near a glacial maximum, when sea levels were much lower than today, making for much less open sea even if they did come directly from the African coast. And, at least from what I can see, there is no reason whatsoever to think they came from that direction anyway. More likely they came in over much shorter distances from the north, at a time when sea levels were low and the voyage would have been very short. If the dating comes in as early as some of the quotes indicate, this could even have been at the same time that the hippopotamus made the same journey.
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Crete is 200 miles from coast now. How high was middeterean see during the ice age and have there been islands in between? Maybe they did not travel 200 miles but much lower distance.
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These are quartzite. The three types of stone that can be cleaved to make tools are quartzite, obsidian and flint. Quartzite is the worst of the three because it doesn't cleave well. If these hominids were "going to sea" you would think they could trade up for flint or obsidian. I'd guess that stone-age teenagers used the area for beach barbeques (the stoned-age). A few thousand tools simply mean a well used party spot. Turning a few old tools into a theory that humans were sea travelers a hundred thousand years before previously thought is a stretch.
Most of the primitive tools here at Slashdot don't have any marks to indicate they had any kind of function at all. ;-)
The reason they're not thinking that is, probably, that there has as yet been no evidence that there were humans in mainland Greece anything like that early. The earliest known sign of human habitation in Europe is only ca. 40k years old.
There's too much speculation. "No evidence of human habitation" doesn't mean there absolutely were no humans, only that we haven't found settlements. I for one would be much more comfortable with an undiscovered Greek sea-faring civilization engaging in island-hopping trade among islands within sight of each other than a mysterious African tribe that suddenly invented the boat to colonize the island they had somehow heard about "over the horizon". Occam's razor, and all that. Obviously if a single discovery can completely "revolutionize" archaeological thought like this, then the "facts" and "evidence" are fairly shaky at best and I wouldn't back a claim that "Greece was uninhabited" is set in stone.
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Despite this, they never really say why this changes their view on sea-faring of ancient times. Currently the north shore of Africa is about 200 miles from crete, but what they seem to have failed to take into account (or at least mention in the article) is that in ancient times sea levels were much much lower. This is estimated to be due to deglacification around 7k years ago. The National Institute of Oceanography states that in studies the sea level of India's coast were about 100m lower about 14k years ago, so extrapolating (a dangerous game I know =) we could say it may be possible that at some point the voyage to Crete was either walkable, or a very short sea voyage.
Not if the sea floor was anything like it is today. A drop of 100m/328 ft would get you about 7 miles further off the coast of Africa than with today's sea levels. On the Crete side, the sea floor drops precipitously off the southern coast, and 100m gets you only about 1 mile. So the lower sea level you cite would shave less than 10 miles off the 200 mile journey.
You can verify the sea floor elevation with Google Earth.
While the Med is, on average, 1500 meters deep, If you look at a map that shows relative ocean depth around the island of Crete you will see that it is possible for a land bridge (or very close to one) on both the east and west sides of the island. Humans have always been known to follow shore lines during migration so this doesn't seem to be a far fetched theory.
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