Mick Hartley

Until recently the earliest human settlements on Crete were dated to around 9,000 years ago. But now…

Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island.

Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. It was around that time that H. erectus spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe.

So Homo Erectus – or whichever branch of the increasingly complex pre-human hominid line these travellers belonged to – could actually sail. I don't know why this should be so surprising, given that they managed to spread overland with remarkable success, but somehow sailing had always seemed a particularly, well, human skill. And from the number of implements found, the idea of a random bunch of folk just getting caught up by the current and drifting across on a raft is, apparently, unlikely. It seems that they may have actually navigated.

All this looking for other intelligent life out in the universe…it's time, not space, which is the barrier. Some day – not in our lifetimes, but someday – the urge to recreate earlier hominids, Homo Erectus, or Neanderthal, will prove irresistible.

Their towels and sunbeds, of course, have long since turned to dust.