This week was an exciting one for any people with a love for Malta’s history.  It’s rare that we get to see history be changed before our very eyes, but a discovery in Mellieha by a team of Maltese archaeologists has done just that – changing what we know about Malta’s pre-history.

The research, led by Professor Eleanor Scerri of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and co-investigator Professor Nicholas Vella from the University of Malta, uncovers an entirely new period in Malta's timeline, pushing back the first signs of human life by at least a millennium, around 40 generations, and officially adding the 'Mesolithic' era to the country's story for the first time, pre-dating the Neolithic period.

In a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, new evidence showed that hunter-gatherers were crossing around 100 kilometres across open Mediterranean waters to reach Malta, likely in simple dugout canoes, with a speed of about 4km per hour, breaking prehistoric seafaring records.

The discoveries were made at the cave site of Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region, where using state-of-the-art methods in archaeological science, researchers found traces of humans in the form of their stone tools, hearths, cooked food waste, and beds of ash.

The site, which is found behind Paradise Bay, has remained archeologically preserved, with all its deposit remaining untouched.

The study, which consisted of site excavation over five years, revealed that humans were living in Malta from at least 8,500 years ago, on a diet of wild food including birds, fish, marine mammals, and local species.

These seafarers would have led to over several hours of darkness in open water, and these hunter-gatherers would have relied on sea surface currents, prevailing winds, the use of landmarks, stars and other wayfinding practices.

The Professors said that remote islands like Malta were long thought to be among the last frontiers of untouched nature, inaccessible to humans until the agricultural revolution.

Europe's last hunter-gatherers were seen as unwilling or unable to get to small and remote islands as they usually need to exploit large areas to hunt and gather wild foods without depleting resources.

However, this discovery upended those views, as evidence has shown that Malta's first people were not the farmers coming from Sicily around 7,000 years ago, who had seemingly found an untouched landscape by humans, but hunter-gatherers who arrived a thousand years earlier, surviving on a rich and now-lost ecosystem of extinct animals and species once believed never to have existed on the islands, Vella said.

"We have to revise the curriculum and amend our history books with these findings. This project is important, not only for Malta, but also more widely, as it is a complete first for hunter-gatherers to cross the Mediterranean, breaking the record of the longest distance travelled in the Mediterranean. This will have repercussions on what we know on the Neolithic period," Vella said.

It’s difficult to put into words how incredible a discovery like this is.  Praise must go to the team which has carried out this work and research and to all those who have supported them.

Discoveries like this show that there is still plenty to learn about Malta’s long and complex history and it shows just how important it is that we ensure the protection of our culture and archaeological heritage.

After all, who knows what may lay beneath our very feet.