A team of researchers led by geologist George Ferentinos from the University of Patras in Greece
In their work, the researchers reconstructed,how the level of the Mediterranean Sea and the coastline of the islands of the Aegean Sea has changed during the ice ages and over the past 450 thousand years. Scientists have used ancient river deltas to determine sea levels and sink rates caused by tectonic activity.
The researchers found that previousreconstructions were wrong. At its lowest point in the last 450,000 years, sea levels were about 225 meters lower than they are today. Although some of the Aegean islands were connected with each other under such changes, this was not enough for them to join the continent. So, people could only populate them by swimming.
Changing the coastline at different water levels in the Mediterranean Sea. Image: Ferentinos et al., Quaternary International
The islands of the Aegean are made up of hundreds of individualplots of land forming an archipelago scattered across the waters between Turkey, Greece and Crete. Artifacts found on the islands of the archipelago show that they were inhabited by ancient people at least 476 thousand years ago.
In addition, tools found on Lesbos andCyclades (archipelago, which includes, for example, Nyxos, Milos and Mykonos), are made in the Acheulean style, developed about 1.76 million years ago. Archaeologists associate it with the settlements of Homo erectus in Africa and Asia.
Previous studies suggested thatsettlement of the islands may have occurred overland when sea levels dropped during ice ages, connecting the islands to the mainland of Europe and Asia. The new reconstruction refutes these hypotheses, confirming that the first navigation appeared much earlier than scientists thought.
The researchers note that since the ancientpeople could cross the Aegean, they probably could also swim across Gibraltar, which means that modern ideas about the colonization of Western Europe from the east may also be incorrect and require additional research.
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