The discovery of stone tools, hearths, and cooked food waste at the cave site of Latnija on the Mediterranean island of Malta shows that hunter-gatherers were crossing at least 100 km of open water to reach the island 8,500 years ago — a thousand years before the arrival of the first farmers.
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Hunter-gatherers were crossing at least 100 km of open water to reach Malta 8,500 years ago. Image credit: Daniel Clarke / MPI GEA.
The Maltese archipelago is a small island chain that is among the most remote in the Mediterranean.
Humans were not thought to have reached and inhabited such small and isolated islands until the regional shift to Neolithic lifeways, around 7,500 years ago.
In the standard view, the limited resources and ecological vulnerabilities of small islands, coupled with the technological challenges of long-distance seafaring, meant that hunter-gatherers were either unable or unwilling to make these journeys.
“Relying on sea surface currents and prevailing winds, as well as the use of landmarks, stars, and other wayfinding practices, a crossing of about 100 km is likely, with a speed of about 4 km per hour,” said Professor Nicholas Vella, a researcher at the University of Malta, co-investigator of the study
“Even on the longest day of the year, these seafarers would have had over several hours of darkness in open water.”
At the cave site of Latnija in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, the researchers found the traces of humans in the form of their stone tools, hearths, and cooked food waste.
“At the site we recovered a diverse array of animals, including hundreds of remains of deer, birds, tortoises, and foxes,” said Dr. Mathew Stewart, a researcher at Griffith University.
“Some of these wild animals were long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time,” added Professor Eleanor Scerri, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and the University of Malta.
“They were hunting and cooking red deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today.”
In addition to this, the scientists found clear evidence for the exploitation of marine resources.
“We found remains of seal, various fish, including grouper, and thousands of edible marine gastropods, crabs and sea urchins, all indisputably cooked,” said Dr. James Blinkhorn, a researcher at the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
“The incorporation of a diverse range of terrestrial and, especially, marine fauna into the diet likely enabled these hunter-gatherers to sustain themselves on an island as small as Malta,” Dr. Stewart said.
These discoveries also raised questions about the extinction of endemic animals on Malta and other small and remote Mediterranean islands, and whether distant Mesolithic communities may have been linked through seafaring.
“The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts,” Professor Scerri said.
The team’s paper was published today in the journal Nature.
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E.M.L. Scerri et al. Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands. Nature, published online April 9, 2025; doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-08780-y
