Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
58 comments
·March 20, 2025BurningFrog
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!
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.
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.
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.
pratik661
I think we are undercounting how much silt gets deposited by major river systems over millenia. The ruins of Lothal, which was a Harappan port city contemporary with Ur are pretty far inland as well. Who knows? Maybe Giza was closer to the coast and was part of a major Nilotic coastal metropolis
kjkjadksj
Persian gulf is just silt being deposited increasing the coastlines. Plenty of other river systems are doing that too.
null
owl_vision
No need for boat during the Messinian Salinity Crisis. This seems to imply once the water started taking over, eyesight navigation was the way.
ch4s3
There weren’t anatomically modern humans the last time the straits of Gibraltar reopened 5.33 MYA.
WalterBright
How does DNA show they traveled by sea?
ch4s3
The remains found in modern Tunisia shared genes with people in what is now Morocco and Spain. It’s more likely they paddled than walked the long way around.
WalterBright
I'd say the case was probable, but it's still speculation.
I'm glad I'm not an archaeologist. They are faced with very little evidence, and of course try to extend it as far as possible. And then a new discovery throws that under the bus.
jajko
Sometimes, you just take by far the most logical conclusion and go with it. Like here - sure, they could have gone around via Turkey on some ridiculous super long trip, crossing various cultures not always open to foreigners while leaving no proofs about it. Or just cross the sea, its not that far and sea faring was one of the first skills mankind learned, over much greater distances and rougher seas than Mediterranean.
poulpy123
The dna shows the migration pattern, and the migration pattern is only compatible with sea travel
Simon_O_Rourke
Ex-pats not immigrants.
mjfl
Wasn’t the water level lower back then? How much smaller was the Mediterranean?
fdb345
[flagged]
calrain
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
Detrytus
Pillars of Hercules name itself is ambiguous, one of the theories is that Plato referred to a pair of Greek islands, not Gibraltar. That would place Atlantis somewhere in the Mediterrain Sea.
card_zero
The source has Ἡρακλέους στήλας. Wiktionary tells me that's more like blocks of Heracles, or slabs or monuments.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... (press "focus" to swap language)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B...
It's kind of completely unambiguous though, given all the details:
> from a distant point in the Atlantic ocean,
> the ocean there was at that time navigable;
> in front of the mouth which you Greeks call, as you say, 'the pillars of Heracles,'
The location is clearly out in the unnavigable Atlantic, and the [whatever] of Heracles form a mouth.
sham1
Well given that the story of Atlantis is quite clearly allegorical, probably not.
Although there probably was some sort of maritime link from Greece to beyond Gibraltar, the link to the Atlantis myth seems rather tenuous and moreover, isn't needed to explain where Platon got the idea for this ancient thalassocracy since he of course lived in Athens when they were doing similar stuff with the Delian League.
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?
blindriver
The story that civilization started 5-6000 years ago in Mesopotamia is pretty quickly eroding away. It’s interesting to see all the new evidence for advanced technology existing much earlier than expected.
cma
Sounds like they canoed across the narrow Straight of Gibralter with a burned out log canoe (or they put a suggestive image of it in there anyway). Hundreds of people have swum across the Straight of Gibralter, I don't think this is showing emergence of civilization necessarily if it was swimming or canoeing.
> 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.