Europe’s stone age hunters made sea voyages to Malta – thousands of years before evidence of sails

The ability to cross oceans has long been a marker of human endeavour, but when did the seas change from being barriers to movement into the maritime highways we know today? For many years the answer was thought to lie in the Neolithic period – the time when humans made the profound transition from hunting and gathering to practising agriculture and living in settled societies. Our team’s discovery of the presence of European hunter-gatherers on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, reported…