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Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
- verisimi 2y agohttps://archive.is/6N7Qr https://archive.is/6N7Qr
- fdb345 2y ago[flagged]
- dgfitz 2y ago> 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 2y agoI don't see how that quote or the article contradicts the title?
- dkarl 2y agoIt's still a sea, even if you stay within sight of land.
- dgfitz 2y ago> Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard to find further evidence for these voyages
- nkrisc 2y agoWhat’s your point?
- dgfitz 2y agoI’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 2y agoI 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 2y agoYou'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.
- throwaway519 2y ago[flagged]
- nkrisc 2y agoThat I don’t understand the point they’re making. Was that not obvious?
- TwoPhonesOneKid 2y agoYou 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 2y ago> 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nradov 2y agoIt'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 10×.
- aksss 2y agoTake 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 2y agoAnd 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 2y agoThere 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 2y agoI 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.
- WalterBright 2y agoHow does DNA show they traveled by sea?
- ch4s3 2y agoThe 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 2y agoI'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 2y agoSometimes, 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.
- WalterBright 2y agoOr maybe: 1. they built a boat and rowed across 2. they banished Thag who had dallied with the King Oog's lady, who then wandered following the shore and a year later was in Spain. Thag was popular with the ladies, and had many descendants 3. through human brownian motion over a century, some wound up in Spain
- poulpy123 2y agoThe dna shows the migration pattern, and the migration pattern is only compatible with sea travel
- mjfl 2y agoWasn’t the water level lower back then? How much smaller was the Mediterranean?
- calrain 2y agoCould the legend of Atlantis just been a reference to early European sailors visiting North Africa, across the Mediterranean?
- forgotTheLast 2y agoNo. Plato's Atlantis is mentioned as being past the pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic
- Detrytus 2y agoPillars 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 2y agoThe source has Ἡρακλέους στήλας. Wiktionary tells me that's more like blocks of Heracles, or slabs or monuments. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0179%3Atext%3DTim.%3Asection%3D24e https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext... (press "focus" to swap language) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AE%CE%BB%CE%B7 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.
- sham1 2y agoWell given that the story of Atlantis is quite clearly allegorical, probably not. Although there probably was some sort of maritime link from Greece to beyond Gibraltar, the link to the Atlantis myth seems rather tenuous and moreover, isn't needed to explain where Platon got the idea for this ancient thalassocracy since he of course lived in Athens when they were doing similar stuff with the Delian League.
- owl_vision 2y agoNo 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messinian_salinity_crisis
- ch4s3 2y agoThere weren’t anatomically modern humans the last time the straits of Gibraltar reopened 5.33 MYA.
- blindriver 2y agoThe 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 2y agoHow do you personally define civilization?
- lostmypassago 2y ago[flagged]
- cma 2y agoSounds 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 2y agoEx-pats not immigrants.