07-30-2026
Thousands of years before farming reached the Mediterranean, small bands of hunter-gatherers were apparently sailing across open water on a regular basis.
Their journeys stretched at least 62 miles (100 kilometers), likely between Sicily and Malta, helping sustain that connection for more than a millennium. The discovery overturns long-standing assumptions about just how capable Europe’s last hunter-gatherer societies were at sea.
The research was led by Jimbob Blinkhorn from the University of Liverpool, along with Professor Eleanor Scerri from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
The team examined new evidence from Malta, one of the most remote islands that hunter-gatherers colonized anywhere in the Mediterranean.
A puzzle hidden on Malta
The core problem the researchers set out to solve was simple to state but difficult to explain. Malta is far too small to have supported a hunter-gatherer population large enough to survive in total isolation for hundreds of years.
Yet archaeological evidence shows people living there continuously for roughly a millennium.
The researchers argue that this combination only makes sense if the island’s occupants maintained ongoing contact with a broader social network through repeated long-distance sea voyages.
“The ability to engage in long-distance seafaring marks a major transition in human history, in which previously impassable maritime barriers became the frontiers of new connections,” Scerri said.
“In the Mediterranean, single-stage, long-distance open-water sea voyaging is first documented in the Mesolithic.
“On Malta, we documented a continuous Mesolithic presence from at least 8,400 to 7,400 years ago. Was this an accidental stranding, or is it representative of a previously unknown seagoing network?”
How many people could survive?
To answer that question, the researchers combined modern ethnographic data with paleoclimate records and sea-level models to estimate how large a hunter-gatherer population Malta could plausibly have supported.
“Unlike farmers, hunter-gatherers are dependent on wild, natural food resources, whose abundance is largely governed by the climate for a given area,” Blinkhorn said.
“By modeling the relationship between modern hunter-gatherer population sizes and their environment, we were able to predict potential past population sizes using high-resolution paleoclimate datasets.
“While Malta was once connected to Sicily by a land bridge, this was inundated around 14,000 years ago, cutting Malta off and limiting the land area available to support hunter-gatherer populations.”
Preventing inbreeding and collapse
The team’s modeling put Malta’s maximum possible post-isolation population between 144 and 170 individuals. More realistic estimates based on ethnographic comparisons suggested the population was considerably smaller.
That low-density prediction holds across the full thousand-year span during which archaeological evidence documents continuous hunter-gatherer occupation on the island.
That population size falls dramatically short of what would have been needed for a group to survive that long in isolation.
“Long-term survival of a population, such as over a millennium evident in the archaeological record, would require 500 to 1,000 reproductive-age adults,” Blinkhorn said.
The researchers predicted that Malta’s population was far smaller than the minimum needed to avoid inbreeding.
They concluded that the island’s hunter-gatherers must have maintained repeated overseas connections with a wider gene pool to prevent population collapse.
Without sustained contact with mainland populations, genetic collapse through inbreeding would have been essentially inevitable. Yet the archaeological record shows no such collapse across a thousand years of continuous occupation.
What hunter-gatherers were capable of
Taken together, the findings point to something far more sophisticated than isolated, one-off voyages of discovery.
“Our study proves that Malta was part of a hitherto unknown, sustained, long-distance sea voyaging network,” Scerri said.
“The last European hunter-gatherers were not only reconfiguring the use of land and sea in a way that preempts the modern world, they were also maintaining social networks in ways we don’t see before.”
That reframing carries real weight for how archaeologists understand this period of prehistory more broadly.
The traditional understanding of Mesolithic hunter-gatherer societies as small, isolated bands tied closely to a single stretch of coastline does not seem to hold.
The findings suggest at least some of these communities were maintaining organized maritime networks capable of supporting repeated, purposeful journeys across open water.
The birth of modern Man
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