A new story for Malta

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SOme 8,500 years ago, long before the myths of Odysseus began to circulate before the sailing ships fought out the trade and cultures of the Mediterranean before the people began to cultivate the country and domesticate the animals–A gang of hunters and collectors stormed from the limestone countries of Sicily, their goal, a shadow at sea: Malta, one of the most remote island archipelago of the Mediterranean.

That is the provocative knowledge behind a new one Nature Study under the direction of archaeologist Eleanor Scerri. At an excavation site called Latnija in the Northern Mellieħa region of the island, outskirts Scerri and her colleagues Stone tools, charred stove, ash tips and the bones of the wild fauna, including marine mammals and gastropods, which are sealed in the old sediments at the sunstrip. This proof increases what we have convinced, who first populated the island and what types of seaside pets could make people during the mesolithic. Most of the archaeologists had assumed that it was neolithic farmers who, not Mesolithic hunter collectors, were inhabitant for the first time, in view of the small size and the remote position of the island.

Scerri from the Max Planck Institute in Germany has been investigating for decades how the Mediterranean was enclosed by early humans. Such detective work is often complicated on large continents: erosion, postponement of sediments and scattered evidence can blur the timeline. “Islands,” explains Scerri, “offer a more contained recording of human arrival and environmental changes.”

Malta reached people almost 1,000 years earlier than previously assumed.

Malta in particular seemed to answer a rich laboratory for answering complex questions about migration and survival. The fossil record of the island contains the bones of extinct dwarf fans and hippos – remants of a time when the miniature mega jauna broke through isolated bags of the Mediterranean. These species have disappeared a long time ago, but Scerri hoped that their remains could help reconstruct the old ecosystems that existed before and after the first arrival of man. “If I could understand how these natural extinction looked,” she thought, “maybe I would learn something that I could continue to translate in time.”

But what she found in her excavation in Latnija Five years ago there was something unexpected: stone tools were buried deep under the layers associated with early agricultural cultures – since people reached Malta almost 1,000 years earlier than previously assumed.

“I never really expected to find something that would shake the basics of what we knew,” she says. “I was certainly not expected to find an older human presence.” But from their first field season in 2019 – only as a trench – it became clear that they were on something. In the next four summers, the team expanded the excavation. The human history of Malta was older than they thought. And the material was clear: people had lived here and hunted here much earlier than it expected.

“Until this study,” said Dylan Gaffney, a Paläolithic archaeologist at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in research, “was not known that Jäger-Sammer groups could reach Malta. The standard view was suspected that the technical challenges of long seabots in combination with the limited resources and vulnerabilities had kept hunter and collectors.

The team of archaeologists used standard techniques to examine the stone tools that they have found in the excavation – named LithicOr only “stone artifacts” – including the measurement of your forms, the recording of detailed features and the attempt to restore the production of the tools. They found that the tools made of local limestone were made, which differs from the sharper rocks such as Chert and Obsidian, which later preferred the later farmers in the Neolithic period. This informed them that the tools were used for hunting, not for agriculture.

These early Maltese would have been survivors of the European Ice Age, the coastal hunter collectors crowded into the new territory when the climate had warmed up. Genetic studies show that mesolithic communities in the entire Mediterranean contested the nearby Sicily-The descent from “Villabruna” populations according to the ICE age, and since Sicily was far from the land mass at the time, it was probably those who ventured through these groups, says Scerrri.

So far it has been assumed that hunter collectors have avoided small, remote islands like Malta.

Perhaps they rose to the high slopes of Sicily to scan the horizon, where Malta can still take a look at Malta in the distance beyond the shimmering sea – and this fleeting line of sight to give its course first speculates Gaffney. And yet they did it.

Malta would have looked very different from the sunburn it is today. Scientists believe that the island was a little larger, cooler and humidity that the valleys ran green with Lentisk and juniper, the Mediterranean thyme. Large songbirds would be flashed through the canopy, foxes and deer that migrated through the grassland, and streams would have rolled up through the undergrowth, says Scerri.

The earlier arrival of the people to the island means that archaeologists not only have to re -evaluate Malta’s past, but also the life and cultures of European hunters and collectors of the time: How they thought how far they went and how underestimated them in the narrative of human expansion.

For years of years – especially during the late ice age and in the early Holocene – the Mediterranean islands have been a springboard for both humans and animals. These scattered land masses became temporary landfalls or waypoints, which made it possible for the species to gradually move over the sea, and hop from the island to island instead of defying long distances of open water. This movement pattern helped people and wild animals equally new habitats, which are moved to shifted climate zones and the spread in the region.

But Malta was considered an exception. So far, it has suspected that hunter collectors avoided small, remote islands like Malta either because they were unreachable or offered too few resources for survival, since hunter collectors generally had to take advantage of a large land area to collect and hunt without exhausting wild resources. But the new evidence from Malta tells a different story: they defy not only a sea that was long enough to navigate through hours of darkness, but also manage to thrive on an island as soon as they were kept too small to support their needs. What the researchers found indicates that this is thanks to a surprisingly different diet that assumes the usual pressure from limited wild resources.

“It is important,” says Scerri, “because it refrains from the knowledge, puts these astonishing late European hunters and gatherers in the foreground and its skills are in a way focused on the focus that has not yet been taken into account. It helps us to understand how this transition to the neolithic in this region looks.”

When Neolithic farmers finally arrived, they brought domesticated animals, harvested and fire and transformed the landscape. Centuries later, driveling, quarry, invasive types and streets came. Many local species disappeared. What remains is a layered story of movement, arrival, invasive species, streets and many species that are lost until the very time.

“Understanding this story,” says Scerri, “not only how these animals were extinct or who did them, but what the effects were, is essential. Because today there are echoes of these ecological and climate -colored trajectories that were also quite dramatic at the time.”

She believes that this long view is now more important than ever.

Mission statement: Dimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay

• Avery Schuyler Nunn

  Posted on April 30, 2025

  Avery Schuyler Nunn is a scientific storyteller based in California. She contributed words and photos National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, Grist, Whalebone Magazine, And The inertiaamong other publications.

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