August 29, 2011

Paleolithic seafarers in the Aegean

From physorg:
A new technique which dates obsidian -- volcanic glass which can be fashioned into tools -- suggests that people were mining for obsidian in Mediterranean waters and shipping the once valuable rocks from the island of Melos in modern day Greece as far back as 15,000 years ago.
"Obsidian was a precious natural rock-glass found only in Melos, some in [the modern-day Greek areas of] Antiparos and Yali," explained Nicolaos Laskaris of the University of the Aegean in Greece. "From there it was spread all over the Aegean and in the continent too through contacts of trade."
If you wanted to have sharp tools and weapons in the days before bronze, you needed places like Melos. But you also needed a boat to get there. The evidence that people were crossing over to Melos even before the end of the last ice age comes from obsidian artifacts found in the Franchthi cave on the Peloponnese peninsula in southern mainland Greece -- far from the island of Melos. Previous geochemical work had already established the artifacts were from Melos, but figuring out when they were brought from the island is a trickier problem.
"They were sailors, certainly, especially in the Aegean region they followed little islands jumping like a frog reaching also Asia Minor and the Greek mainland," said Laskaris, who with his colleagues has published a paper about the discovery in the Sept. 2011 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science. "Until now only in Franchthi cave obsidians had been found at circa 8,500 B.C. Now we prove earlier contact with coastal sites was a fact."


Journal of Archaeological Science
Volume 38, Issue 9, September 2011, Pages 2475-2479

Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene seafaring in the Aegean: new obsidian hydration dates with the SIMS-SS method

N. Laskaris, A. Sampson, F. Mavridis and I. Liritzis

Abstract
Archaeological evidence regarding the presence of obsidian in levels that antedate the food production stage could have been the result of usage or intrusion of small obsidian artifacts from overlying Neolithic layers. The new obsidian hydration dates presented below employing the novel SIMS-SS method, offers new results of absolute dating concordant with the excavation data. Our contribution sheds new light on the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene exploitation of obsidian sources on the island of Melos in the Cyclades reporting dates c. 13th millennium - end of 10th millennium B.P.

Link

8 comments:

terryt said...

"Our contribution sheds new light on the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene exploitation of obsidian sources on the island of Melos in the Cyclades reporting dates c. 13th millennium - end of 10th millennium B.P."

That's still long after people had reached Australia and New Guinea.

Dienekes said...

The important thing about this story is not that Paleolithic man could cross the sea (we know they did so in Australia, as you point out, and even H. heidelbergensis, or H. Neanderthalensis did so >100,000 years ago in Crete).

The interesting new aspect is that the obsidian trade network was established in the Paleolithic, so we have organized long-range behavior by hunter-gatherers, rather than simply migration from A to B (as in the case of Australia), or an occasional foray (until more evidence shows up), as in the case of Crete.

sykes.1 said...

Are trading networks one of the defining characters of H. sapiens? Do they go back to the Cro-Magnons?

Dienekes said...

Use of non-local resources via trade is definitely something that is characteristic of modern humans.

In order to detect long-distance exchange of goods, however, the material culture must be differentiated, so that you can detect "stuff" that could not have been produced locally. Obsidian is such a thing, because it does not occur in the mainland and had to be imported from Melos.

Gioiello said...

If I remember well, Italy, above all the North Sicily Islands, were one of the main source of obsidian in the ancient world, and I wonder you wonder having found the highest variance of R-M269 of this last Busby’s paper in North-West Sicily. Probably it is another prejudice that what is in Sicily has come from East.

Gioiello said...

I’d say Western Mediterranean (Italy-Spain). This is the weirdest haplotype from Busby’s: TP03 SIC-W. From YHRD we have also DYS385=12-12. From Busby we know that it is R-M269 (xS127).

2 16 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,13 10 12 15 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 >>
1 16 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 14 16 22 12 >>
1 16 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 14 17 22 13 >>
1 16 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 15 17 22 12 >>
1 16 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 >>

2 of 56 Sardinia, Italy [Sardinian] Eurasian - European - Western European Europe
2 of 1100 United States [Hispanic American] Admixed North America
1 of 180 Granada, Spain [Spanish] Eurasian - European - Western European Europe
1 of 543 Santander, Colombia [Mestizo] Admixed Latin America

17 13 28 23 10 11 13 10 12 15 10 >>
16 13 28 23 10 11 13 10 11 15 9 >>
16 13 28 23 10 11 13 10 12 14 4 >>
15 13 28 23 10 11 13 10 12 15 2 >>
16 14 29 23 10 11 13 10 12 15 2 >>
16 13 28 23 10 11 12 10 12 15 2 >>
16 12 27 23 10 11 13 10 12 15 1 >>
16 13 28 22 10 11 13 10 12 15 1 >>
16 13 27 23 10 11 13 10 12 15 0 >>

3 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 >>
2 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 11,12 10 12 15 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 >>
1 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 20 14 16 22 12 >>
1 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 13 17 23 11 >>
1 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 14 16 22 12 >>
1 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 14 17 21 11 >>
1 17 13 28 23 10 11 13 12,12 10 12 15 21 14 17 22 11 >>
2 of 1100 United States [Hispanic American] Admixed North America
2 of 56 Sardinia, Italy [Sardinian] Eurasian - European - Western European Europe
1 of 280 Liaoning, China [Xibe] Eurasian - Altaic Asia
1 of 543 Santander, Colombia [Mestizo] Admixed Latin America
1 of 212 Costa Rica [Mestizo] Admixed Latin America
1 of 327 Córdoba, Argentina [European] Eurasian - European Latin America
1 of 113 Belgium [Flemish] Eurasian - European - Western European Europe
1 of 1041 United States [European American] Eurasian - European North America

Of course probably it is an R1a and not R1b. Not good for Busby and company.

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

I'd love to see some remnants of paleolithic boats (perhaps beneath ocean sediments from the Aegean).

terryt said...

"I'd love to see some remnants of paleolithic boats (perhaps beneath ocean sediments from the Aegean)".

Paleolithic boats should presumably also be found in swamps, as I doubt any such boats were used solely for sea-going.