14 DAY TRIAL // New evidence seems to attest the belief that early hominids, such as Homo erectus, might have left Africa on rafts, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Experts suggest that stone hand axes found in the Mediterranean Basin, and on the island of Crete, might have been used by these people to construct rafts and other types of vessels, to visit southern Europe, and all other islands in between. The main starting point of these incursions was North Africa, Providence College in Rhode Island archaeologist Thomas Strasser says, as quoted by Wired.
The researchers were themselves surprised at the wealth of artifacts they discovered in the southern parts of Crete. According to archaeologists, several hundred double-edged cutting tools were unearthed there. All of them were dated to at least 130,000 years ago, although the team admits that some of them may actually be a lot older than that. According to Strasser, the design of these axes closely resembles the one found in other H. erectus tools, dating back to at least 800,000 years ago. The expert presented the finds four days ago, at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archeology.
What's really interesting about the findings is the fact that the oldest known settlements in Crete were until now believed to be just 9,000 years old. Historians believed that small farming groups, having mastered the art of going to sea, traveled from Southern Europe, and the Middle East, and gradually occupied the Mediterranean islands. Te new evidence seems to point at the fact that the islands were occupied hundreds of thousands of years before by people coming from Africa.
“We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place,” Strasser says. University of South Florida archaeologist Robert Tykot believes that a number of questions still remain unanswered. He is wondering whether the H. erectus planned to go to Europe, or hominids navigating close to the shorelines were blown out into the sea, and ended on the island. Strasser says that a lot of work remains to be done on this issue, even if he has been working on Crete for the past two decades.