Give a guy a couple million years, he’ll get around…

From Archaeology Magazine:

Crete's Ice Age Seafarers

Curtis Runnels slipped a three-inch-long hunk of milky quartz into his pocket and figured it would make a great expedition paperweight. In 2008, the Boston University archaeologist had collected what he thought was an unworked stone just a few days into a survey for Mesolithic artifacts at the mouth of a gorge on the southern coast of Crete. But early the next day, as he sat on his patio and drank his coffee, the low sun hit the paperweight just right. "Suddenly, I could see the flake scars," he recalls. "This isn't even Mesolithic, this is much older."

How much older? The "paperweight" was actually a scraper at least 130,000 years old, suggesting that this island has a much deeper history than previously thought. Crete has been an island for five million years, so the scraper could only have been produced if a member of an ancient human species, possibly Homo erectus, first boated to the island and dropped it. Indeed, the discovery of hundreds more Paleolithic artifacts on Crete during expeditions in 2008 and 2009 pushes back the history of seafaring in the region by more than 100,000 years, causing scientists to rethink how humans traveled out of Africa. "This means that every hypothesis we've had about early humans, their migrations, their cognitive and technical abilities needs to be questioned," Runnels says. "Archaeologists looking for traces of early human migration are quite possibly looking in the wrong places."

In June 2008, Strasser and Runnels spent their days clambering along the flanks of the gorge. Strasser says he was skeptical that Runnels's paperweight was actually a scraper, but more tools kept turning up: scrapers, cores, and blades that resembled tools from the Acheulean industry, the kind of tool kit known to have been used by Homo erectus. One day, a team member discovered a classic Acheulean hand-ax, five inches long. "That's when I was convinced we had tools associated with the first hominids to leave Africa," Strasser says.

But, he knew he needed to confirm the age of the tools based on something other than their style. Karl Wegmann, a geomorphologist now at North Carolina State University, was just completing his doctoral dissertation on the gorge. Based on the age of the sediments in which the oldest artifacts were found, he dates them to at least 130,000 years old. However, geological processes had lifted the sediments up by more than 300 feet and redeposited the tools, meaning that they could be much older. Similar artifacts from North Africa have been dated to 700,000 years ago, Runnels says. The team also found more than a thousand artifacts dating from 11,000 to 9,000 years ago, indicating a rich history of Mesolithic settlement on the island.

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