A pre homo sapiens version of humanity must have been able to sail the Mediterranean. Paleogeology has shown that the water levels never dipped low enough for the Aegean Islands to be reachable by land, so the 450,000 y/o artifacts must come from humans using boats. But homo sapiens starts 300 kya, so this is way before that.
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
REALLY Ancient Mariners
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6 comments:
Did they take the plate motions into account? 37mm/year times 476000 is about a dozen miles, and some of their low-Med exposures look about that size.
"They did this by using rates of subsidence caused by tectonic activity as well as old river deltas, which may be used to estimate sea level. They also discovered that earlier reconstructions were flawed."
It is always possible someone will later discover that this reconstruction was flawed as well. But they seem to have considered at least one aspect of plate tectonics in this one.
I saw that too, but noticed that their maps for different eras had exactly the same relative locations even though the contours differed slightly. Unfortunately until the status paperwork goes through I can't get at the original papers anymore.
I'm being one of those annoying people who comments without reading the link, but my recollection is that a majority of the Aegean Islands fall within a range of 2-25 NM of some other island or land, that being port to port sailing distance. Line of sight land-to-land being much shorter.
That puts many of them within what I'd consider plausible "swimming with buoyancy aids" range of the mainland and each other.
Which doesn't necessarily rule out sailing, but I could see a logical progression from "I can swim there if I've got something to hold me afloat when I need to rest" to "I can make my float into a little raft that I can push or pull my provisions on" to "I should just ride this raft and let the wind carry me over".
Dimitris-Sakellariou https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dimitris-Sakellariou-2/publication/279848495_Pleistocene_submerged_landscapes_and_Palaeolithic_archaeology_in_the_tectonically_active_Aegean_region/links/569f4a4908aee4d26ad0e8bf/Pleistocene-submerged-landscapes-and-Palaeolithic-archaeology-in-the-tectonically-active-Aegean-region.pdf
The Late Pleistocene Central Aegean Island Bridge separated the Central Aegean Lake to the north from the South Aegean enclosed Sea to the south (Lykousis 2009). Since
MIS 6, the Central Aegean landmass has broken into two main parts: the western part includes the Cyclades Plateau, which initially remained connected to central Greece but was transformed into a large island during the LGM (Kapsimalis et al. 2009); and the eastern part, which includes most of the north and east Dodekanese islands, Ikaria and Samos, which remained attached to the Anatolian landmass during all low-sea-level periods.
So it looks like the maps shown in the article don't take into account some of the claims about horizontal movement mentioned in the references.
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