Did Acheuleans Walk or Swim to Crete?
Archaeological discoveries on the island of Crete put the arrival of humans no earlier than 10,00-12,000 years ago. This is hardly surprising because, so the geologists tell us, Crete has been an island for at least five million years and even island-hopping from the Greek mainland you would have a 24-mile stretch of open sea to cross between Attiki and Crete. (In the other direction you have 35 miles of open sea between the eastern-most tip of Cete and the Dodecanese island of Kasos.) Clearly such sea crossings were beyond the technology of primitive man whose mental abilities were probably on a par with those of people who wear their baseball caps the wrong way round.
Recently a team led by Eleni Panagopoulou of the Greek Ministry of Culture and by Thomas Strasser of Providence College, Rhode Island, have been surveying the south-western shore of Crete near the town of Plakias. To their astonishment they discovered a number of stone tools, including oval and pear-shaped hand axes, which are identical to those found over a wide area in north Africa and known as Acheulean.
In Africa the Acheulean culture is dated to 700,000 years before the present, but as a voyage from the nearest point of Libya to the tiny island of Gavdhos, just off the coast of Crete, is 162 miles of sea, no one dares to suggest that the producers and users of these tools came from there. Instead it is believed that the Acheuleans circled round the eastern Mediterranean via the Sinai Desert, Palestine and Turkey.
Naturally, being slowed down by their knuckles dragging on the ground, the Acheuleans couldn't do the trip as briskly as you or I might have done, so the earlist they could possibly have arrived at Crete is around 130,000 years ago. The trouble is that that puts their arrival on Crete at around 118,000 years before humans had the ability to build boats and sail the open seas.
Up until now the very earliest sea voyages were believed to be the ones which brought the ancestors of the aborigines to Australia, which happened a mere 60,000 years go, yet if the new evidence from Crete is to be believed, early humans were gaily sailing around the Mediterranean 70,000 years before their eastern colleagues paddled aross the Torres Straits to risk the crocodiles of Queensland.
Strasser and Panagopoulou proudly announce that their discovery is going to open a new chapter and lead to an entirely new timeline of human development, but I wonder just how new they dare to be?
Quite apart from any questions about the dates - after all, carbon-14 dating is only accurate to around 10,000 BC and dates before that have such large possible errors that they can only be taken as guides to relative dating - there is another possibility. Did the Acheuleans sail to Crete or did they, perhaps, walk?
Geologists assure us that Crete has been an island for 5,000,000 years and base their opinion on all sorts of things like present rates of earth movement, estimations of how long ago the Straits of Gibralter formed, and so on. The trouble is that the historical records tell an entirely different story.
Take, for example, the island of Cyprus, which at present lies 44 miles off the southern coast of Turkey. Like Crete, Cyprus became an island millions of years ago when the Mediterranean basin flooded, though it was formed even longer ago when the Arican and Eurasian plates colided and broke apart around 20 million years ago. Yet, in book VIII of his Natural History, Pliny remarks:
Deer cross seas swimming in a herd strung out in line with their heads resting on the haunches of the ones in front of them and taking it in turns to drop to the rear. This is most noticed when they are crossing from Cilicia to Cyprus; and they do not keep land in sight but swim towards its scent.
It is, I suppose, possible that Pliny was lying through his teeth when he spoke of deer migrating from Cilicia to Cyprus and back again. It is also possible that he was simply mistaken and his informant meant that the deer just went into the sea and swam around in circles for the fun of it. However it is also possible that he was absolutely correct and that herds of deer following an immemorial route, swam across the sea from Turkey to Cyprus and then returned in the spring.
The only problem is that 44 miles is a bit far for even the most energetic deer and when one considers the does and fawns as well, the whole thing becomes incredible - unless Cyprus was a good deal closer to the Turkish mainland than it is today.
If this were the only evidence, it could be easily dismissed. In fact Pliny mentions several other things which point to large and violent earth movements in historical times. For example, in book III he has this to say about Sicily:
In former times it was attached to the southern part of Italy, but later it was separated from it by an overflow of the sea, forming a strait 15 miles long and 1.5 miles wide at the Royal Pillar. This monument of the formation of the gap is the origin of the Greek name of the town situated on the Italian coast, Rhegium.
In other words the Straits of Messina formed at a time not only when there were humans around to note and be impressed by the fact - so impressed that they erected a monument - but the humans were possessed of literacy and of the degree of culture that leads to the erection of monuments to significant events.
In other places in his book Pliny cites the sudden and violent disappearance of cities and islands (or the appearance of islands). He ascribes these events to the warfare between the gods of Earth and Sea, but though we need not accept his explanation of them, I really see no reason to reject his account of the facts. On the whole Pliny was a detailed and reliable observer of the world around him. If he says that shortly before his day the Bosphorus could be forded by oxen, I believe him.
Geologists are honest, hard-working men and women, but their science is a relatively new one and is based on present processes and rates. I have no doubt that today Europe and America are separating at about the rate of a fingernail growing, but I would not stake my life that that rate has been unchanged throughout history.
Or take another example: the Nile Delta was, until the construction of the Aswan High Dam, growing at a particular rate. It was measured accurately and I have no doubt that that is so. However ancient historians tell us that within historical times the Pharos Island of Alexandria was a day's sailing from the coast - 12 to 20 miles - yet by the time of Alexander it was only a few hundred yards from the coast.
Judged by the modern, measured rate of growth of the Nile Delta, the statement is impossible and historians leap to the conclusion that the ancient authors were totally wrong. Meanwhile down at Semna West, an ancient Egyptian site now buried beneath the waters of the Aswan High Dam, archaeologists were stunned to discover that early pharaohs had left carvings in the rocks above the cataract where the Nile rushes between granite outcrops to mark the levels of the Nile Flood. The highest of these was 90 metres - 270' - above the present flood levels.
Either there have been some pretty substantial - and selective - earth movements to heave those markers unrealistically high above the Nile while leaving the river bed untouched, or the Nile floods were dramatically greater and higher in ancient times - high enough to make all estimates about the rate of growth of the Delta several orders of magnitude too slow.
So did the Acheuleans walk, swim or sail to Crete? Personally I think they sailed; my bet is that they weren't as primitive and ape-like as anthropologists like to think. Every evidence we have shows that our ancestors were as intelligent and cultured as we ourselves, just not as technologically clever - but given the world they handed down to us and the polluted, exhausted world we are handing down to our descendants, I really wonder which of us is the less intelligent.
© Kendall K. Down 2010
