Early human (or prehuman?) seafarers
A recent find on Crete shakes up the current view of human prehistory. Archaeologists have found more than 2,000 stone tools, including hand axes, probably dating back at least 130,000 years on the southern shore of Crete. This is more than 100,000 years earlier than previously known arrivals at islands in that part of the Mediterranean, and around 70,000 years earlier than the earliest well-established maritime migration anywhere in the world. The geological strata in which the tools were found are around 100,000 to 130,000 years old, and the discoverers consider that to be a minimum age for the tools themselves, which could be considerably older. It’s not clear who made them: Homo sapiens or one of the other hominids still around 130,000 years or more ago. In any event, it’s a surprising insight into unsuspected capabilities of very early seafaring hominids. More work, planned for this summer, may narrow down the date at which the stone artifacts were produced.
The New York Times has an article about the find, with a photo of some of the stone tools.
