(CN) — Ancient artifacts discovered from the Mediterranean Sea confirm that Neolithic pioneers were using sophisticated nautical technologies even thousands of years ago, according to European archeologists. These artifacts, they say, even help to explain the origins of European farming and the cultivation of agricultural mainstays from the Near East.
In their study published in PLOS ONE, a team of Italian and Spanish archeologists analyzed five dugout canoes — boats hollowed out from tree trunks — found beneath Lake Bracciano in Anguillara Sabazia, Italy. The findings, they say, indicate that many of the major advances in sailing must have occurred in the early Neolithic period 7,800 years ago.
The canoes in question are a part of numerous well-preserved artifacts and structures comprising the lakeshore settlement of La Marmotta, about 20 miles northwest of Rome. Now buried beneath 36 feet of water and sediment in Lake Bracciano, the settlement’s location suggests its inhabitants could have reached the Tyrrhenian Sea portion of the Mediterranean through the connecting Arrone River.
“The dugout canoes at La Marmotta are undoubtedly exceptional examples of prehistoric boats and nautical systems,” the authors wrote in the study, adding that the size, design and compositional variety of the boats confirm what archeologists already suspected about the genesis of European farming associated with eastern Mediterranean origins.
The canoes are also the only known boats in the Mediterranean found in Neolithic or New Stone Age sites — settlements representing a prehistoric period of cultural and technological evolution featuring developed stone tools, permanent villages, agricultural cultivation and the creation of artifacts like pottery and woven fabrics.
Unlike similar Mesolithic or Old Stone Age dugouts found in France, Germany, Holland, Denmark and Slovenia, the canoes at La Marmotta were not made from a singular species of tree. The researchers found that the canoes were burnt from alder, oak, poplar and European beech trunks, indicating that the Neolithic boat-builders understood wood quality and which trees they could use to make dugouts.
Additionally, the researchers found that the canoes included advanced construction techniques such as transverse reinforcements. One boat even featured three T-shaped wooden objects, each with a series of holes that the researchers suspect fastened ropes tied to sails or other nautical elements.
“These canoes at La Marmotta, and the occupation of many islands in the eastern and central Mediterranean during the Mesolithic and particularly the early Neolithic periods, are irrefutable proof of the ability of those societies to travel across the water,” the authors wrote. “This is enormously significant, because all the canoes found at European Mesolithic and Neolithic sites are associated with lakes and therefore with sailing in those waters.”
The researchers noted further evidence of the canoes’ seaworthiness through experimental archaeology. In 1998, for example, a team of archeologists reproduced a Marmotta canoe and sailed over 497 miles around the Mediterranean coast from Italy to Portugal. In another experiment, a group of 8 to ten inexperienced rowers took turns navigating a similar logboat — achieving an average speed of 35 miles per day in favorable conditions.
“If it can be supposed that Neolithic crewmen must have been more experienced sailors, they would surely have covered long distances in a short time, especially in the most suitable months,” the authors wrote.
Overall, the researchers say that the discoveries at La Marmotta — which is expected to be much larger than what has already been uncovered since 1992 — is transforming the way archeologists understand the first Neolithic farming groups and how they managed to travel Europe from the Mediterranean.
“It is only in this way that we can understand how they crossed the Mediterranean Sea and occupied the coasts of Europe and Africa in the space of a few centuries,” the researchers wrote. “In the lands where they settled, they introduced their new economic model based on domestic plant and animal species. That model has reached the present time and thus we are without doubt their most direct heirs.”
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