Ancient navigation 130,000 years ago

It was a few years ago that a Greek-American archaeological team made a startling discovery – they found the oldest indications of navigation in an area called “Plakia” in Crete Island, Greece, an important discovery that probably few have heard of, even if it reached the top ten discoveries of 2010.

A Palaeolithic site was discovered at the canyon of Preveli where, in more than 20 different locations, more than 30 hand axes and several hundred other stone tools have been dated to at least 130,000 years old. Quartz had been used as the raw material to manufacture the tools because of its characteristic to give sharp edges. Finding hand axes of such an old age show that modern Homo Sapiens weren’t the only technologically advanced species. In the same area, elevated marine terraces were also discovered. The findings suggest that sea travelling existed in the Mediterranean Sea tens of thousands of years before what archaeologists initially believed, and that early humans used seacrafts capable of open-sea navigation and for multiple journeys. To travel from Africa to Crete would suggest a 200 km trip on open water, something that wouldn’t have been possible at that time.

The area around ‘Plakia’ was active between 130,000 and 700,000 years ago, an era when Crete was still an island (and has been for more than five million years). This also suggests that the hand axes found could have been up to 700,000 years old. Until recently there was evidence showing that the prehistory of Crete goes back to the Neolithic period 3,000 to 7,000 BC, and this is the first time that such evidence has been found.

This discovery shows another underestimation of our ‘primitive’ ancestors that were supposedly incapable of sophisticated behaviour and definitely not travelling through the seas. Such discovery completely shakes what we know about human migration and expansion which until now suggested that ancient humans migrated on foot from Africa to the other continents. However, what was found in Crete changes completely how things could have happened. And this is where archaeologists debate about the ‘status quo’ and the new findings contradicting it.

The earliest ancient seafaring that is accepted by conventional archaeology comes from Australia where our human ancestors had to cross between islands with the maximum open water distance of 71 km and that was only 50,000 years ago. So we can see how impossible a 200km ocean trip would appear 130,000 years ago.

By John Black

Related Links

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