Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
39 comments
·March 20, 2025calrain
Could the legend of Atlantis just been a reference to early European sailors visiting North Africa, across the Mediterranean?
forgotTheLast
No. Plato's Atlantis is mentioned as being past the pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic
bschmidt701
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bschmidt719
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BurningFrog
> Many potential stopovers are now submerged
If I was a billionaire, I'd look into funding tech for excavating coastlines during the ice age(s), That's where any 10k old civilizations must have been.
jjulius
There's a similar case to be made for the Pacific Northwest - there's likely a good chunk of human history beneath Puget Sound and the Pacific.
https://www.cascadepbs.org/2011/05/lost-civilization-along-w...
SpicyUme
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911...
This sea level hinge idea points towards an area to look that didn't get pushed underwater. As far as I have read people are looking and finding signs of humans. The north end of Vancouver island and the Brooks peninsula also may have stayed glacier free during the ice age.
nradov
It's like the old joke about the drunk who's searching for his lost keys under a streetlight because the light is better there. Archaeologists have barely begun to excavate underwater sites where people lived back when sea levels were much lower. There is surely much to discover but doing anything underwater increases the cost by at least 10×.
aksss
Take a look at Doggerland. It's been known for over 100 years with no lack of interest, but as you say, underwater archaeology is expensive and technically difficult.
qwytw
And it's not like there is much to find, most of the things people in Doggerland made were out of wood, there are no ancient stone ruins or lost treasures.
BurningFrog
That's why we need a few billionaires to chip in!
pratik661
The Persian Gulf would be a goldmine for this.
blululu
Surprisingly the Persian Gulf is likely the exact opposite scenario. Modern research suggests that ancient likes like Ur were likely on the coastline while modern Basra would have been totally submerged. In most of the world the post glacial trend has pushed the coastline in but in the Persian gulf the trend points the other way. There is the possibility that the reason that Iraq is such a gold mine for archeological sites is because it is one of the rare places where the sea went the other way.
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walrus01
Doggerland is probably full of possible archaeological evidence, but it's now submerged. Fishing vessels occasionally haul up a mammoth tusk. Or even a whole mammoth skull with tusks attached.
WalterBright
How does DNA show they traveled by sea?
mjfl
Wasn’t the water level lower back then? How much smaller was the Mediterranean?
fdb345
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dgfitz
> Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could have traversed the Sicilian Strait in long wooden canoes, navigating from island to island by sight. Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard to find further evidence for these voyages, Lucarini adds.
The title is misleading.
TwoPhonesOneKid
You could also cross in a raft. Or on a log. You can swim across (riskily, quite riskily) at the straight of gibraltar itself. We've known humans have been seafaring tens of thousands of years before our earliest archaeological evidence (although dugout canoes are likely just as old, it's very bad conditions for preservation outside of stuff like northern european bogs/the dead sea, and they often just look like logs underwater, not boats)—at no point has Australia been fully connected to continental asia. Hell, this is true for H Erectus, let alone h s sapiens—it's not difficult to believe H Erectus might have pieced together how to lash logs together.
On articles like this, I strongly recommend just ignoring the title. It's enough to make anyone with a mild background in the subject frustrated. The research itself remains incredibly interesting.
monadINtop
I don't see how that quote or the article contradicts the title?
No need for boat during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. This seems to imply once the water started taking over, eyesight navigation was the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis