Archaeologists Found Ancient Humans on a Mediterranean Island—but They Shouldn’t Have Survived There

3 min readHere’s what you’ll learn when reading this story:In 2019, archaeologists discovered evidence that hunter-gatherers inhabited the island of Malta some 1,000 years before the arrival of farmers. A year after publishing those findings, the same archaeologists analyzed how hunter-gatherers could have thrived on the semi-arid island for nearly 1,000 years before the invention of sails. The results show that to sustain itself for a millennium, the group must have made regular trips to nearby Sicily.Isolated islands are fascinating laboratories for understanding ancient humans. Some islands feature wonders insulated from the machinations of human progress for hundreds—or even thousands—of years, while others were once home to entirely different species of humans found nowhere else on Earth. And then, some islands can challenge what we know about the capabilities of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And in this regard, the Republic of Malta, a Mediterranean island located roughly 60 miles from Sicily, has been a real head-scratcher.The mystery began back in 2019 when archaeologists uncovered evidence of shellfish meals, limestone tools, and butchered deer that radiocarbon dating of the animal bone showed was at least 8,500 years old—roughly 1,000 years earlier than the first known group of farmers to settle the island.“We didn’t believe it,” Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology archaeologist Eleanor Scerri, lead author of a 2025 study detailing the find, told Science. “It took us five additional extensive [field] seasons to convince ourselves … that this had to be what we thought it was.”But before rewriting history, Scerri, along with her co-author James Blinkhorn at the University of Liverpool and other researchers from Europe, including Malta, endeavored to piece together how a hunter-gatherer community could live and thrive on such a semi-arid island. At first glance, the question may seem like a simple one: Just ferry boats back and forth from the landmass of origin, likely Sicily or Tunisia, to bring in additional food, supplies, and people. But this period in the Mesolithic is roughly one thousand years before the invention of sails, and frequent trips to and from the shore would have been remarkably difficult.In a new study published in the journal PNAS Nexus, Scerri, Blinkhorn, and their team reconstructed historical sea-level changes in the area, calculated Malta’s “net primary productivity” to set a baseline for wild resources available to the ancient population on the island, and established the minimum distance of a sea voyage to neighboring population centers, among other data points. The other perplexing detail of this study is that for a population to flourish for 1,000 years, as shown in the Maltese Mesolithic record, it would have had to consist of at least 1,000 people of reproductive age, reflecting a total population of around 2,500 to 3,000. Piecing all this together, a plausible story began to emerge.“Malta was incapable of hosting an isolated, viable population that could have lived continuously through the 1,000-year time frame,” Scerri and Blinkhorn wrote in The Conversation. “Consequently, we can rule out the persistence of a population stranded on Malta as sea levels inundated the land bridge to Sicily.” Because the land bridge had completely submerged around 14,000 years ago—thousands of years before humans first arrived—the settlers must have crossed the open sea to reach the island in the first place.The study instead argues that in order to maintain enough genetic diversity to persist for 1,000 years, this hunter-gatherer group must have made repeated sea journeys from Malta to Sicily and back. This expands the perceived capabilities of European hunter-gatherers, whose intimate ties to the land were thought to limit their ability as seafaring people. This discovery creates a new Mesolithic thread in the heart of the Mediterranean that’s making experts question where else these hunter-gatherer groups may have journeyed.“All this suggests we may be looking at a hitherto unknown web of overseas links that marked the beginning of the connected world we know today, centuries before the first farmers reached the central Mediterranean,” the authors write in The Conversation. “With these implicit capabilities, we can then start to ask, where else did they go?”Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.