Stone Age Seafarers Likely Crossed Over 50 Miles Of Sea To Reach Malta

Ancient Foragers on Malta Weren’t Isolated. They Were Getting Help by Sea

Malta is a small, dry archipelago in the central Mediterranean, roughly 56 miles south of Sicily. Historians long assumed nobody settled there until farmers arrived with enough know-how to make island life work. Then archaeologists found evidence of hunter-gatherers living on the Maltese islands for at least a thousand years before that. A new study explains what that discovery means: those ancient people could not have maintained a self-sustaining population on Malta over the long term. Somebody had to keep coming back.

Researchers modeled Malta’s ancient ecology and population limits across thousands of years, concluding the island could not have supported a viable, persistent hunter-gatherer population on its own. During the actual window when people are known to have lived there, Malta could have held at most somewhere between 144 and 170 people, well below the threshold needed for long-term viability without outside contact. Maintaining any presence there over centuries would have required repeated open-water crossings from Sicily, made in prehistoric watercraft long before the age of sail.

Put plainly, ancient people likely traveled an open-sea route with a modeled minimum distance of more than 50 miles, again and again, in an era considered far beyond what the Maltese Mesolithic record alone was thought to require of prehistoric seafarers.

Malta Lost Its Land Bridge and Shrank to a Fraction of Its Size

To figure out whether Malta could have supported a permanent population of prehistoric foragers, researchers writing in PNAS Nexus combined ocean depth data with models of ancient sea level change, reconstructing Malta and Sicily as they looked tens of thousands of years ago. During the Last Glacial Maximum, the two formed one large landmass covering roughly 15,000 to 17,000 square miles.

Rising seas steadily ate away at that landmass. By 12,900 years ago at the latest, the land bridge connecting Malta to Sicily had flooded completely. Malta shrank rapidly from about 425 square miles at 14,100 years ago to roughly 142 square miles by 8,900 years ago, close to its present size.

Researchers also calculated how productive the land was for plant and animal life, which determines how many people it could feed. Comparing climate data against how densely modern hunter-gatherer populations live in similar environments, they translated landscape productivity into population estimates. Malta’s numbers came up small across every scenario the team tested.

Not Enough People for Long-Term Survival on Malta Alone

To put those numbers in perspective, researchers often cite a benchmark of roughly 1,000 people for a population to stay genetically and demographically healthy over many centuries, a figure that in practice requires an even larger group of people living and reproducing on the ground. Malta’s numbers were close to enough for a small group to get by for a handful of generations, just not for a thousand years.

“The highest predicted Maltese Mesolithic forager census population sizes that could be supported range between 144 and 170 individuals,” the authors write.

Sicily, in contrast, cleared the threshold comfortably, matching patterns seen in ancient DNA studies.

Malta’s food supply offered little workaround. Aside from shore snails, fish and marine mammals made up only a small share of food remains at Latnija, while deer bones dominated. Those deer persisted without signs of over-exploitation, consistent with a small population not straining local resources.

The Sea Route Grew Past 50 Miles as Malta Split From Sicily

Sicily was the closest large landmass, and the one researchers modeled directly, making it the most plausible starting point for outside contact.

As the connecting land vanished, the crossing distance grew fast. A brief window of stepping-stone islands broke the journey into shorter segments, with the longest single stretch starting around 4.7 miles at 14,100 years ago and growing to roughly 20 miles within a few centuries. Those islands were swallowed by rising seas too, and by 10,000 years ago, the minimum modeled crossing had grown past 50 miles, a distance that only increased in the centuries that followed.

During the documented period of Maltese settlement, roughly 8,500 to 7,500 years ago, that minimum crossing distance was already past 50 miles. People likely made that open-water trip in prehistoric watercraft, long before the age of sail, and did it often enough to keep a small outpost community alive.

The combination of favorable currents and fewer islands to break up the journey, unlike the crowded Aegean Sea to the east, may have made this stretch of the Mediterranean an early testing ground for long-distance sea travel.

Seafaring May Explain European Ancestry Found in North Africa

Perhaps the most far-reaching implication extends beyond Malta. Genetic studies have found traces of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in prehistoric remains from Tunisia, a finding that has long puzzled researchers. Regular open-water seafaring in the south-central Mediterranean could offer a plausible mechanism for that connection, the authors suggest, though the study does not show people sailed directly from Malta to North Africa. It points to wider, plausible chains of contact.

Malta’s later prehistory reinforces how precarious island life remained, with repeated gaps in occupation even after farming arrived.

Getting to Malta and staying there took repeated effort, not a single lucky arrival. That pattern challenges the assumption that Mediterranean hunter-gatherers lacked the ability or incentive to maintain contact with small, remote islands.

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