[HN Gopher] Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea...
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Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
Author : gmays
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-03-20 18:23 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| verisimi wrote:
| https://archive.is/6N7Qr
| dgfitz wrote:
| > 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.
| monadINtop wrote:
| I don't see how that quote or the article contradicts the
| title?
| dkarl wrote:
| It's still a sea, even if you stay within sight of land.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard
| to find further evidence for these voyages
| nkrisc wrote:
| What's your point?
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'm so sorry, I don't understand the disconnect.
|
| > Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could
| have traversed
|
| "May" and "could have" aren't meaningful, and the quotes
| ends with additional ambiguity.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't see the problem. They're making a claim and have
| some evidence. That of course doesn't mean they're
| actually correct, but that's their claim.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You're interpreting 'could have' as a possibility when it
| can also be interpreted as a statement of capability.
|
| - Evidence X, Y, Z points to a European origin for these
| discoveries.
|
| - How could Europeans have got to North Africa so long
| ago?
|
| - They could have done it by island hopping.
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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 10x.
| aksss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| generativenoise wrote:
| There may be no grand objects to be found, but that does
| not mean there isn't much to find. The thing that we will
| find is more knowledge about those societies.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| I think it's more about the cost and complexity of
| finding anything than trying to somehow imply that the
| societies living there were inferior.
|
| We already know relatively little about Neolithic Europe
| despite there being major cities there that rivaled or
| eclipsed those in Mesopotamia in population. Yet we
| hardly know anything about them in comparison because
| they used perishable materials for almost everything (and
| it's not only because of writing). Finding anything
| useful underwater makes that many times harder.
| nukem222 wrote:
| > We already know relatively little about Neolithic
| Europe despite there being major cities there that
| rivaled or eclipsed those in Mesopotamia in population.
|
| What are you referring to? I could certainly imagine such
| a thing but I can't say I've ever heard of someone
| _finding evidence_ of a city that matches this
| description.
| jajko wrote:
| You want to find ancient marvels? Start digging literally
| anywhere in or around Rome. Or half of amazon jungle. Or
| around London. And so on. You can get much more 'value'
| in form of artifacts and knowledge from there for given
| money.
|
| Submerged places... imagine how complex and slow
| archaeologic excavations look on the ground. Now move it
| 50m underwater in endless mud. Good luck looking for
| literal needle in the muddy haystack of 40,000km2. To
| find what... some fossilized wood or few arrow heads?
| That culture was very similar to ones on neighboring
| lands, no atlantis there.
|
| One day, robots can scan and dig through there but there
| are so many better ways to spending money, any money,
| that it makes perfect sense nobody is doing it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| How can we know that without excavating?
| OJFord wrote:
| Period, trade - archaeology is but one discipline. How
| could we track and plan our excavation without writing a
| to-do/kanban app?
| Someone wrote:
| Treasures are small and rare enough so you can never rule
| them out completely, but if there were significant
| amounts of rocks there, we would know because Doggerland
| has been fairly thoroughly "ploughed" by fishing trawlers
| and mapped for research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do
| ggerland#Discovery_and_inves...)
|
| The geology of the North Sea also indicates "sand" more
| than "rocks".
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >here are no ancient stone ruins or lost treasures.
|
| Like Stonehenge? How can we possibly know what's there
| without looking thoroughly?
| qwytw wrote:
| Because it's highly unlikely given the evidence we have?
| Is there any reason to believe that material culture in
| Doggerland could have been fundamentally different to
| that of other hunter gatherer societies in Europe at the
| time?
|
| There is a 4000-5000 year gap between Doggerland sinking
| and Stonehenge i.e. similar to that of Stonehenge being
| built and our days so it's hardly relevant.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's why we need a few billionaires to chip in!
| jjulius wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pratik661 wrote:
| The Persian Gulf would be a goldmine for this.
| blululu wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Persian gulf is just silt being deposited increasing the
| coastlines. Plenty of other river systems are doing that
| too.
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland
| WalterBright wrote:
| How does DNA show they traveled by sea?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The dna shows the migration pattern, and the migration pattern
| is only compatible with sea travel
| mjfl wrote:
| Wasn't the water level lower back then? How much smaller was the
| Mediterranean?
| calrain wrote:
| Could the legend of Atlantis just been a reference to early
| European sailors visiting North Africa, across the Mediterranean?
| forgotTheLast wrote:
| No. Plato's Atlantis is mentioned as being past the pillars of
| Hercules in the Atlantic
| Detrytus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The source has Erakleous stelas. Wiktionary tells me that's
| more like _blocks_ of Heracles, or slabs or monuments.
|
| https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atex
| t... (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_.
| owl_vision wrote:
| 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
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There weren't anatomically modern humans the last time the
| straits of Gibraltar reopened 5.33 MYA.
| blindriver wrote:
| 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.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| How do you personally define civilization?
| cma wrote:
| 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.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| Ex-pats not immigrants.
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