Scarce food drove Malta’s Stone Age hunters to sea

Stone Age hunter gatherers on Malta were not isolated survivors but skilled seafarers who maintained regular contact with the mainland, a computer modelling study reported by ERR suggests.

Researchers had long believed that wide stretches of water posed an insurmountable challenge for Europe’s early hunter gatherers, and that permanently settling distant islands was possible only for later farming communities.

That view was challenged by discoveries described last year, which showed that hunter gatherers lived on Malta at least 8,500 years ago, about 1,000 years before the first farmers arrived. The findings also left open the possibility that people had reached the island even earlier, before the land bridge linking Malta and Sicily sank beneath the Mediterranean.

Scientists from the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute examined the Mediterranean’s past using high-resolution climate simulations covering the last 21,000 years and bathymetric maps of the seabed.

The models showed that the land bridge between Sicily and Malta finally disappeared beneath the water about 14,200 years ago. Malta’s area then shrank by hundreds of square kilometres in a very short time. By the time of the Mesolithic settlement, reaching the island from Sicily would already have required an 80-kilometre sea journey.

To estimate living conditions on the island, the researchers calculated the ancient landscape’s primary net production, or the growth rate of local vegetation. They used the Miami model, which links plant growth mainly to rainfall and temperature. Net production limits the food chain and directly determines the maximum population an island can support.

The results indicated that Malta’s conditions were extremely poor. According to lead author James Blinkhorn, the island’s theoretical population fell sharply after the land bridge disappeared. The model estimated that Malta’s ecosystem could support a maximum of 144 to 170 people during the Mesolithic period.

A biologically viable population requires a diverse gene pool and at least several thousand people to survive over the long term. Smaller isolated communities would inevitably have disappeared because of inbreeding and limited resources.

Yet the early inhabitants lived successfully on the island for at least 1,000 years. Blinkhorn said the archaeological evidence and the models together ruled out the possibility that groups had simply become trapped on Malta when the land bridge sank.