mediterranean “prehistory” 47
reunification became a major driver of Mediterranean biological evolution. Second,
and in sharp contrast, the maritime connectivity so central to later Mediterranean
history is conspicuous by its all but total absence. Admittedly, the evidence remains
too scanty to be conclusive, but there is no compelling evidence for early crossings
at Gibraltar or the Sicilian strait, while claims of a presence on islands need to be
treated with caution both at the evidential level and in terms of extrapolations
concerning the cognitive abilities of hominins and the performance of putative
sea-craft. This peculiar landscape of broken-up mainlands wrapped around an
empty sea, subjected to drastic climatic pressures, goes a long way, later, to explain
the parallel evolution and patchy occupancies of Homo sapiens in Africa and
Neanderthals in Europe, a speciation process from a common ancestor, beginning
some 400 000 years ago, that would be unthinkable without the Mediterranean as
a divider. Once the former species (better known as “us”) began to expand along
the Levant and into Europe from some 47 000 years ago, even now retracing the
old terrestrial axis, it would be the southern peninsulas of Mediterranean Europe—
in Iberia, Italy, and surely Greece—that harbored the last Neanderthal popula-
tions in existence. Relatively shortly after these vanished, a final, intensively
investigated spike of cold known as the Last Glacial Maximum (21 000–18 000
bce) can serve as a valedictory illustration of vanished, to us partly pre-
Mediterranean conditions, with perhaps a mere 45 000 people huddled into
refugia all around the basin, each group trying to maintain the vital external links
without which each isolate was doomed, yet still only rarely crossing a sea that
had, at this juncture, dropped by some 120 meters (due to the uptake of global
seawater in the circum-polar ice-sheets), and shrunk by more than a tenth of its
current extent.
Seafaring and farmingThe planetary warming at the end of this last glacial phase was a turning point for the
Mediterranean, as for humanity in general. Two of the most decisive developments
actually belong to the climatically see-sawing millennia immediately before the start of
the relatively stable Holocene. Among the very diverse responses of Mediterranean
hunter-gatherers to swiftly ameliorating surroundings, those of Natufian groups in the
Levant stand out for an unusual degree of sedentism and their tending of the still-wild
stands of cereals that Mediterranean-type conditions had long sponsored in the Fertile
Crescent. This way of life had some local roots further back, during the Last Glacial
Maximum, but was equally obviously anticipatory of the Neolithic in the same region.
Meanwhile, and at present correlated with a temporary reversal to colder, drier times
right at the end of the Pleistocene, we witness the first incontrovertible evidence in the
eleventh millennium for competent seafaring over substantial distances. To date, the
best examples come from the east, where hunter-gatherers reached Cyprus across at
least 65 km of open sea, while those in the Aegean hopped between the Cyclades over
even larger aggregate distances to collect Melian obsidian, a black volcanic glass used
for tools. Once warm, wet early Holocene conditions became firmly established after
9600, with a verdant expansion of deciduous woodland and rising seas, these twin
trajectories of sedentary cultivation and maritime travel combined at a general level
(the realities were surely more complex) to transform the Mediterranean.