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Until quite recently the received wisdom was that none of the Mediterranean islands were colonized until the Neolithic, ca. 9000 years ago in the case of the Aegean (Crete), despite the fact that archaic humans occupied the surrounding continents for over a million years. Moreover, this pattern seemed to be a global phenomenon, with island lifeways all seemingly beginning after the last Ice Age, and by extent the product of modern humans (Homo sapiens), whereby seafaring might be seen as an index of behavioral modernity, one of the ‘winning’ evolutionary traits that meant that while all other early human species died out, we survived…

This disciplinary thesis was challenged in 2009 by a series of discoveries on the island of Crete, with Strasser and colleagues arguing that the island had been first settled over 100,000 years ago by pre-sapiens populations.

In 2013 we began the Stelida Naxos Archaeological Project to engage further with this major debate through the study of a chert source and early stone tool production center, excavating meters of deposits filled with the remnants of knapping debris, including the kinds of technologies associated typically with Neanderthals.

This talk shares our research on Naxos in the light of these much larger issues of human history, arguing that we now have the earliest (indirect) evidence for seagoing in the northern hemisphere, the question then becoming ‘but who were these nascent Cycladic mariners?’.

Prof. Tristan Carter, McMaster University

Wednesday, September 25 at noon Eastern Time and 7 pm in Greece
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