Ancient humans were seafaring far earlier than we realised

Malta is one of the Mediterranean’s most remote islands. The nearest land is Sicily, about 85 kilometres north. Today, with ferries and planes, getting there is light work, but in the distant past, Malta was difficult to reach. It’s far enough from Sicily that you can’t see it over the horizon, at least from ground level – and paddling there in a canoe would take over 24 hours, so you would have to navigate by starlight after the day turned dark.

In short, if you try to imagine somewhere that Stone Age peoples were able to reach, Malta probably isn’t at the top of the list. Yet reach it they did.

We know this because archaeologist Eleanor Scerri at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and her colleagues excavated a sinkhole in northern Malta, from 2021 to 2023. They found traces of humans: ash from hearths, stone tools and butchered deer bones. Carbon dating showed that people were living there 8500 years ago, the team reported in Nature in April 2025.

At a stroke, this extends the human occupation of Malta by over 1000 years. But more importantly, these people were not only alive in the Stone Age; they were also hunter-gatherers, as opposed to people from farming communities with more advanced tools. Archaeologists had often assumed that hunter-gatherers didn’t cross wide spans of ocean. Scerri’s team showed otherwise.

It’s a finding that brings vital fresh weight to what have been controversial ideas concerning the voyaging capabilities of ancient peoples, and one that asks us to consider a series of intriguing questions. If Mediterranean hunter-gatherers could cross nearly 100 kilometres of ocean 8500 years ago, what other sea crossings did they make? How far back into prehistory does seafaring extend? And what do these crossings reveal about the minds of early humans?

Stone Age sea crossings

For much of the 20th century, scholars of prehistory assumed that humans reached islands only fairly recently, says archaeologist Dylan Gaffney at the University of Oxford.

That’s true for remote Pacific islands like Hawaii and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). They were settled within only the past 2000 years, by people with phenomenal navigation skills. Other islands, though, are easier to reach.

When researchers try to figure out when people first took to the water, they face an immediate problem. Boats don’t preserve well because they are normally made of materials like wood and hide, which rot. As a result, the oldest known boats aren’t very old at all. The oldest, at about 10,000 years, is the Pesse canoe, a dugout canoe found buried in a peat bog in the Netherlands. At As-Sabiyah in Kuwait, researchers found the remnants of a reed boat from about 7000 years ago. And at Lake Bracciano in Italy, a submerged village contained five canoes made between about 7900 and 6800 years ago.

This was an important period in Eurasian prehistory. Modern humans had been living in Eurasia for tens of thousands of years, always as hunter-gatherers. But in a few regions, like the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, some groups started farming: they grew crops like wheat and kept domesticated animals like cows. These populations were spreading rapidly, and the farming lifestyle was replacing hunting and gathering. Later, farming communities would develop other innovations like writing, organised religion and empires.

Almost all the early boats found were associated with farming communities; the Pesse canoe is the only one that predates agriculture. So, it has been tempting for archaeologists to assume that hunter-gatherers couldn’t or didn’t make boats, and therefore didn’t cross wide bodies of water. Seafaring, they concluded, was a more modern occupation.

That has all changed in the past 20 years. “There’s been a revision,” says Gaffney. “People have started finding sites on islands [that are] very early.” If humans were living on a remote island – like Malta – they must have travelled there somehow. Beyond a certain point, swimming isn’t practical, so they must have had watercraft. “This is a relatively new research area,” says Curtis Runnels at Boston University. “There are many opinions out there and lots of controversy.”

One place where seafaring may have begun early is the islands of western Scotland, like the Hebrides, says archaeologist Stephanie Blankshein at the University of Southampton in the UK. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were visiting these islands as early as 10,000 years ago. Distinctive stones, which can only be sourced from certain islands, can be found on mainland Britain. “So we know Mesolithic people were moving between these places,” says Blankshein. The seaways were challenging, with rapid currents and powerful tides, but the islands are fairly close together.

For long-distance prehistoric seafaring, the evidence comes from two main regions. That is the Mediterranean and islands of South-East Asia, says archaeologist John Cherry at Brown University in Rhode Island, co-author of Human Dispersal, Human Evolution and the Sea.

An early Mediterranean hint of Stone Age seafaring came from Franchthi cave, on the Peloponnese peninsula in Greece. In 1973, archaeologists described pieces of obsidian found in the cave, which had come from the island of Melos, over 100 kilometres to the south-east. In 2011, the obsidian was dated to up to 13,000 years ago – suggesting hunter-gatherers were voyaging to and from Melos at that time.

However, it is in South-East Asia and Australasia that researchers have found evidence of truly ancient long-distance seafaring, spanning periods of time as deep into the past as 100,000, or even a million and beyond, years ago.

Island hopping

Around 70,000 or 60,000 years ago, modern humans began leaving Africa in large numbers, perhaps because they had learned to live in a wider variety of ecosystems or their populations had grown. Some of them wandered east into Asia and eventually reached the continent’s south-eastern limit. Today, that is the Malaysian peninsula. The geography of the region was different at this time, though.

Earth was deep in a glacial period, so enormous volumes of water were locked away in ice sheets. As a result, sea levels were lower, so places that today are shallow seas were then dry land. The modern islands of Borneo, Sumatra and Java were all connected to the Asian mainland, forming a landmass called Sundaland. Humans could walk from modern-day Thailand and Vietnam all the way to the eastern tip of Java without crossing an ocean.

There, they must have stopped, having found deep water and strong currents. To the south and east, there lay another huge landmass: Australia and New Guinea, which were joined by exposed land, forming a continent called Sahul. But that lay far beyond the horizon – although the smoke from bushfires, or migrating birds, might have given them clues as to its existence. Ahead was open water, dotted with islands like Sulawesi and Timor.

Despite this, humans got to Sahul quickly. In 2022, at a rock shelter in northern Australia called Madjedbebe, archaeologists found stone tools spanning the past 65,000 years. While that date isn’t universally accepted, says Gaffney, it seems clear people were in Australia at least 50,000 years ago. Likewise, there is evidence of people on New Guinea 49,000 years ago.

Gaffney has excavated on the Raja Ampat islands, just west of New Guinea. In 2024, his team described a chunk of plant resin, which indicated that people were living there 55,000 years ago. The implication is that people voyaged east from Sundaland, reaching Raja Ampat and then going on to Sahul.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that humans in South-East Asia took to seafaring, says Gaffney. There were several enabling factors: “It was warm water. They had lots of vegetation to make rafts from. Some of the island crossings aren’t that far.” This means we can push seafaring back much earlier into prehistory: 65,000 years or more, as opposed to the 10,000-year-old Pesse canoe and Hebridean voyages.

Nevertheless, it’s still only a fraction of the human story. Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa, perhaps around 300,000 years ago. However, other human-like hominins existed as far back as 7 million years ago. The earliest ones seem to have been confined to Africa, but from around 2 million years ago, some wandered into Eurasia. Homo erectus got all the way east to Java, while Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. Did any of these other hominins ever take to the water?

To Luzon and Flores

The argument that modern humans used boats to reach Australia is simple: there was no way to get there other than over water. So if a piece of land was always an island, and we can find traces of hominins, then those hominins were seafarers.

If you follow that logic, then it is possible to extrapolate seafaring way back into prehistory. On the island of Flores, east of Java in Indonesia, there lived a unique population of hominins called Homo floresiensis, first described in 2004. Because they were so short, barely a metre tall, they have been nicknamed “hobbits”. Their fossil record is limited, but they seem to have lived on Flores between 190,000 and 50,000 years ago. “Flores has never been connected with the immediately adjacent islands,” says Cherry.

Further back in time, another mysterious group of hominins lived on Luzon in the Philippines. Homo luzonensis was discovered only in 2019, so we don’t yet know much about them. The fossils are all from one cave and are between 67,000 and 50,000 years old. However, a 2018 study reported butchered rhinoceros bones on the island, which suggests a hominin presence, dating back 709,000 years.

Oldest of all, in August 2025, researchers described seven stone tools from the island of Sulawesi. They were between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years old. The tools are, by far, the oldest evidence of hominins on Sulawesi. A few scholars have interpreted these finds as evidence of seafaring hundreds of thousands of years ago, by hominins that long predated our species. However, both Cherry and Gaffney argue that we can’t say that with confidence.

Other animals do sometimes cross the ocean by accident, after all – and hominins could have, too. They may be swept out to sea, perhaps on floating vegetation after a flood. And South-East Asia has a monsoon climate, so intense rainstorms and floods are commonplace.

Even today, there is ample evidence of “huge floating rafts of vegetation being swept out to sea, including not only all the trees and plants and everything, but all of the other critters that were on that block of land at the time, including primates”, says Cherry. Such rafting journeys are infrequent, and often the animals don’t survive. But over vast spans of time, a few journeys would be successful (see “Isolated on islands”).

“My favourite example is actually the divergence of Old World and New World monkeys,” says Cherry. The monkeys that live in South America today are only distantly related to those in Africa and Eurasia: the two groups split tens of millions of years ago. The best explanation we have is that a group of monkeys was accidentally carried west across the Atlantic, from Africa to South America, at a time when that ocean was not quite as wide as it is today. “That is, I think, absolutely clearly what happened.”

A study published in March 2025 offered evidence that iguanas once made an even more epic journey. Today, iguanas can be found living on the islands of Fiji, in the south-west Pacific Ocean, east of Australia. However, the study found that the closest living relatives of Fijian iguanas are North American desert iguanas, indicating that the iguanas rafted westwards over the Pacific around 30 million years ago, a journey of more than 8000 kilometres. This is, Cherry says drily, “probably a record”.

In South-East Asia, “you can often see, after storm events, lots of driftwood, lots of massive vegetation coming down the rivers”, says Gaffney. “So you can imagine a few hominins hanging on to logs there, or mangroves, and being washed out to different islands.”

This doesn’t mean that earlier hominins like the hobbits had no maritime skills at all. “Maybe these hominins had the ability to float, the ability to cling onto rafts and paddle or the ability to even swim,” says Gaffney. “If they were washed out to sea, they could survive a bit longer than other animals.”

Boat builders

Gaffney argues that we should only infer purposeful seafaring, using watercraft, if hominins crossed water frequently. Flores, Luzon and Sulawesi represent a handful of crossings over a million years – easily explained by chance. In contrast, the journeys made by modern humans to Australia around 60,000 years ago represent multiple crossings within, at most, 20,000 years. That’s “the blink of an eye”, says Gaffney, and “shows that people are deliberately doing something”.

While we don’t have preserved boats from tens of thousands of years ago, we do know that modern humans had “composite technology”, meaning they could combine two or more objects, says Gaffney. For instance, they were hafting stone tools onto spears. “We know people had resins and adhesives. People had string and twine. People were using bamboo… All of the components are there to make a raft.” There’s no evidence that other Asian hominins, like the so-called hobbits or H. luzonensis, had composite technology. This implies they probably couldn’t build boats or rafts.

The one species that perhaps could have done so was the Neanderthals. Long derided as lumbering numbskulls, Neanderthals are now understood to have been extremely similar to modern humans in their capabilities. They were highly adaptable, surviving equally well in the south of Spain and the Altai mountains of Siberia. There is evidence of them burying their dead, painting on cave walls and making jewellery from seashells. And they could make twine or similar cordage. “That was a big, exciting discovery,” says Cherry.

“I think people are open to the idea that Neanderthals were also seafaring, or at least crossing water gaps, what we might call seagoing,” says Gaffney. “That’s coming primarily from evidence in the Ionian Islands off the western coast of Greece.” Hominins were there as early as 110,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals dominated Europe.

There is also evidence from more remote Greek islands. Stone tools on Crete have been suggested to be between 130,000 and 700,000 years old, although they haven’t been firmly dated. Similarly ancient tools have been found on the nearby island of Gavdos. Meanwhile, a 2019 study reported 9000 stone artefacts, typical of those made by Neanderthals, on Naxos. The oldest were around 200,000 years old.

“There is probably growing acceptance that early humans, and perhaps hominins like Neanderthals, were making sea crossings to the Greek islands earlier than 200,000 years ago,” says Runnels.

The fact that our distant ancestors, and even our Neanderthal cousins, were crossing wide bodies of water tells us a great deal about their minds and abilities. To make a journey, you must first gather materials and build a craft, so they must have been able to plan many steps ahead. “They have to think in the future,” says Gaffney.

But seafaring also points to something intangible – prehistoric peoples were cooperative. Building boats takes a long time, so “you would have reduced that labour cost by having multiple people”, he adds.

Seafaring is also evidence for something even harder to see across deep time: courage. “I’ve been in reconstructed Norse Viking ships,” says Blankshein. “They feel pretty sturdy.” But simpler craft don’t feel so secure. “If you start thinking about getting into a hide-skin boat and travelling long distances… there’s absolutely no way that most people would do that.”

Yet many prehistoric people, like those who made their way to Malta at least 8500 years ago, must have jumped into boats and taken that chance, voyaging to new lands that they couldn’t be sure were there, because they lay far beyond the horizon. These were incredible, inspiring leaps of faith – and they took our ancestors all around the globe.