The island of Sicily is considered to be among the first occupied by humans in the European Upper Paleolithic. Studies to understand early occupation of the island are mostly concentrated on the northern shores. An international team of archaeologists led by Washington University in St. Louis has now searched for the human occupation traces in 25 caves and rock shelters in southeastern Sicily, Italy.
Coastal and underwater cave sites in southern Sicily contain important new clues about the path and fate of early human migrants to the island. Image credit: Ilaria Patania.
Sicily, the largest Mediterranean island, is considered by many scholars to be the earliest island in the region to be permanently occupied by human ancestors, but when and how the early migrants accomplished this feat remains unknown.
This island is less than two miles from mainland Italy, but the water crossing would have been extremely difficult for early humans.
In the ancient Greek poem the Odyssey, Homer describes how Odysseus sailed his ship past the mythical sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis as he crossed the Sicily strait.
The strait was well known to sailors of the past; they attributed the deadly forces of its waves and whirlpools to powerful monsters.
In modern times, thousands of migrants from North Africa attempt to cross the strait each year. Many don’t make it, some capsizing just a few hundred meters from landing.
“What we are looking for is not just the first person who arrived, but the first community,” said Dr. Ilaria Patania, a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Understanding the timing of the initial colonization of Sicily provides key data for the pattern and mode of the early expansion of Homo sapiens into the Mediterranean.”
“This research shows that new ways of thinking and looking can reveal patterns that weren’t visible before,” added Washington University in St. Louis Professor T.R. Kidder.
“Previous scholars assumed that sites on the southern coast of Sicily would be eroded or too damaged to yield useful information.”
“But finding underwater sites opens up a whole new terrain to study.”
“It allows us to reconsider routes of migration of these earliest modern human ancestors.”
Scholars agree that humans had made it to Sicily by 16,000 years after the Last Glacial Maximum.
But that established date is puzzlingly late, given that humans are known to have dispersed by land into Siberia about 30,000 years earlier.
The discrepancy has led some to wonder if humans actually arrived on Sicily much before the currently accepted dates.
Also, no one yet knows whether humans arrived on Sicily by seafaring, or by foot over a land bridge — or even what direction they came from.
“A challenge for understanding the spread of early modern human ancestors is that we don’t fully understand how they spread and colonized the world at a very early stage,” Professor Kidder said.
“Did folks come down from Italy and cross the Straits of Messina, or did they come from the south along the African coast?”
“Or, is it possible that they were island hopping across the Mediterranean? Locating sites on the south coast helps us consider pathways and thus modes of behavior.”
“In southeast Sicily, very few Upper Paleolithic sites have been excavated and analyzed using scientific methods,” Dr. Patania said.
“Our project is still in its early stages, but already we have identified and assessed over 40 sites of interest, of which about 17 are sites that have been relocated with greater precision based on older identifications.”
Two of the new sites identified by the team may contain Upper Paleolithic human occupation traces, including fossil fauna.
Corruggi is located at the southernmost tip of Sicily. The site was originally identified by other researchers in the 1940s.
“This site is where a second land bridge would have connected this island with the island of Malta,” Dr. Patania said.
“When we inspected this site, we found teeth from a European wild ass and stone tools.”
“Analyzing the remains from this site might give us insight on the very last leg of the human journey south into the southernmost coast of Sicily and off toward Malta.”
During summer 2024, the archaeologists worked on excavating the second site, a cave called Campolato.
“Here we have discovered evidence for sea-level changes caused by the last glaciation and a localized earthquake that we are still investigating,” Dr. Patania said.
“We hope to reconstruct not only the timing of human occupation, but also the environment these people lived in and how they negotiated with natural events like earthquakes, climatic and environmental changes and maybe even volcanic eruptions.”
The findings appear in the journal PLoS ONE.
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I. Patania et al. 2024. Between land and sea: A multidisciplinary approach to understand the Early Occupation of Sicily (EOS). PLoS ONE 19 (10): e0299118; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299118
This article is a version of a press-release provided by Washington University in St. Louis.
