46 cyprian broodbank
Just as in later times, the “prehistory” of the Mediterranean cannot be divorced
from those of surrounding regions (see Doumanis, Kea, this volume). In this respect,
and further to the globally all but unique circumstance of the planet’s most extensive
Mediterraneanoid environment mapped onto its largest inland sea, plate tectonics
delivered the early Mediterranean a remarkable suite of neighbors. Most notable
among these were Africa, a powerhouse of human evolution with an elongated ter-
restrial interface running through the current Sahara and a sole overland exit that
skirted the Mediterranean at the Suez isthmus, and the Fertile Crescent, a generous
proportion of which lay within the basin by any definition, and which still furnishes,
if by a diminishing margin, the largest, earliest hearth of plant and animal domestica-
tion in the world. Later, the broader Near East would achieve an equally important
status in terms of its influence on Mediterranean history. Probably of least formative
consequence within the periods that engage us here, were relations with transmon-
tane Europe, though connections certainly existed from an early date. In all these
cases, however, it is very striking how rapidly external developments became custom-
ized to Mediterranean conditions, how much internal, bottom-up change was driven
by those self-same conditions, and how decisively, by the mid-first millennium, socie-
ties and economies within the Mediterranean were starting to break the bounds of
their basin and to form a far-reaching vortex of intercontinental exchange.
The speciating seaThe first peoplings of the Mediterranean basin long pre-date the emergence of our
own species, and are intimately tied in with small-scale, episodic pulses of expansion
and contraction by African hominins. A putative age of 1.8 million years obtains for
the site of Ain Hanech in the eastern Maghreb, with dates a few hundred thousand
years younger in modern Israel (in effect a minor offshoot of African biota and cli-
mate), and slightly older dates along this southern flank are to be anticipated. So far,
the earliest evidence from the European side is substantially younger, with dates of
just over a million years ago from Iberia, and slightly later ones in Italy, followed from
about 500 000 years ago by a more solid horizon associated here, and elsewhere, with
a new big-brained, hunting hominin, Homo heidelbergensis, the direct ancestor of
ourselves and others. The climatic framework for all this was a shift from roughly 2.5
million years ago to cooler, drier conditions associated with the Pleistocene, and the
increasingly severe oscillations within this between glacial phases, basically cold and
dry within the Mediterranean (or so arid in the Sahara as to prohibit occupation), and
short interglacials with conditions sometimes even warmer and wetter than those of
our current Holocene—as well as innumerable fluctuations between these poles.
Patterns of activity across this remote period should be of interest to a wider
audience than Paleolithic specialists for two salient reasons. First, the fragmenta-
tion often identified as a defining feature of Mediterranean topography and ecol-
ogy, and itself hard-wired into the basin’s continually tortured tectonic past, was
already playing a role, even if the fillers of the tesserae were often wildly different
from those familiar to us (to take two extremes, the now-extinct cold-weather
great auk, and such denizens of balmier climes as relatives of the modern elephant).
This mosaic offered refugia for Mediterranean plants, animals and hominins
during harsh climatic phases, and the resultant repeated cycles of division and