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Hunter-gatherers sustained Malta's first population through repeated sea journeys to Sicily, study finds
A new study has found that Europe's last hunter-gatherers regularly travelled by sea between Sicily and Malta, helping to sustain the islands' first human population thousands of years before farming began.
The research, published in PNAS Nexus, was led by from the University of Liverpool and Professor Eleanor Scerri from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, together with researchers from the University of Malta and the University of Cambridge.
Archaeological evidence shows that hunter-gatherers lived on Malta continuously between 8,400 and 7,400 years ago. However, the islands were too small to support a large enough population to survive in isolation for such a long period.
“On Malta, we documented a continuous Mesolithic presence from at least 8400 to 7400 years ago. Was this an accidental stranding, however, or is it representative of a previously unknown seagoing network?”
To answer the question, the research team, led by the University of Liverpool’s Computational Archaeology of the Stone Age group, combined insights from modern ethnography with palaeoclimate data and sea-level models to examine likely hunter-gatherer population sizes and long-term survival possibilities.
“Unlike farmers, hunter-gatherers are dependent on wild, natural food resources, whose abundance is largely governed by the climate for a given area, with larger areas and more productive environments able to support larger populations” says Dr Jimbob Blinkhorn, the lead author of the study, “By modelling the relationship between modern hunter-gatherer population sizes and their environment, we were able to predict potential past population sizes using high-resolution palaeoclimate datasets. While Malta was once connected to Sicily via a land-bridge, this was inundated by around 14 thousand years ago, cutting Malta off and limiting the land area to support hunter-gatherer populations.”
The study’s estimates showed that the maximum possible population size Malta could have supported after its isolation from Sicily ranged between 170-144 individuals, with more realistic, ethnographic-derived predictions estimating a considerably smaller population. This low population density prediction spans the 1000-year timeframe that recent archaeological discoveries document hunter-gatherer occupation of Malta
“Long-term survival of a population, such as over a millennium evident in the archaeological record, would require 500-1000 reproductive-age adults, before we include the young and the elderly,” explains Dr Blinkhorn. “Given that we predict far smaller population sizes in Malta, these hunter-gatherers must have been connected to a wider gene pool to prevent inbreeding and collapse; the only way this would be possible is through repeated, overseas connections.”
“Our study proves that Malta was part of a hitherto unknown, sustained, long-distance sea voyaging network”, add Professor Scerri, “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, connecting islands and coastlines, perhaps even across continents.”
The findings suggest that Malta's hunter-gatherers maintained regular contact with people overseas, most likely by making repeated sea journeys of at least 100 kilometres between Sicily and Malta.
Dr Blinkhorn is supported by a University of Liverpool University Research Fellowship. The research was funded by a European Research Council Grant awarded to Prof Scerri.
