September 4, 2024

Wednesday Open Comments

B R E A K I N G ! ! !

Humans built bridge on island in 4000 BCE!

It’s exciting news if you’re into the human prehistory of Spain’s Balearic Islands. Before it became a haven for northern European vacationers on package tours, the Mediterranean isle of Mallorca was home to human habitants approximately 6000 years ago, give or take the odd few decades. The bridge was made of sandstone stacked in a cave, and it now lies below today’s sea level.

The picture at the link doesn’t do the bridge any justice. It looks like nothing more than a bunch of unimpressive rocks stacked up, now submerged under water. It does not seem to sport any fancy stone carving or other artistry. Prehistoric artifacts from so long ago are few and far between at the site, frequently in a context where they’ve been disturbed or lack surrounding contextual evidence indicating their age or distinguishing cultural identifiers. Most of the organic materials have rotted away completely without a trace.

The most impressive feature of the bridge is that it clearly shows evidence of human activity, fully preserved (thanks to the cave’s protection) and surrounded by clay and bone artifacts enabling its date to be fairly well estimated.

The cave bridge was initially dated to 4400 years ago, but the subsequent discovery of more artifacts and water level marks led to a reassessment.

In addition to the broken artifacts, the cave was littered with bones from a now-extinct goat-antelope known as Myotragus balearicus, according to a statement from the university.

However, when people occupied the cave still remained unclear.

I’m not sure why I found this interesting, other than that it’s something that doesn’t involve contemporary politics. Well, except that many articles at news outlets like BBC and CNN found it necessary to mention climate change in the form of “rising sea levels”. Forty years ago, a similar news item might have mentioned that the humans who built the bridge were surely felled by too much red meat in their diets, or whatever the “science” obsession du jour was in 1984, whatever it was that established news outlets felt the need to lecture everyone about in every context.

At any rate, humans 6000 years ago were not known to have settled on Mallorca, which one article noted is the sixth largest island in the Med. Here’s a picture of where the islands are situated, via a screen grab from Google Earth, marked and labeled by your bleary-eyed correspondent.

For temporal orientation, Christ was born around 4000 years after the structure was built; our species is estimated to have existed, oh, between 244,000 and 294,000 years before anyone built this. And the most recent ice age is guesstimated to have “ended” around 10,000 years ago, which is approximately 4000 years prior to when this rock structure was assembled—for whatever reasons folks had for building bridges in caves for us to find six thousand years hence.

Some would say that the most recent ice age is still underway, since there are still significant ice patches on the globe today, unlike other prehistoric interglacials, when all the ice had melted.

We sincerely hope these ancients were respectful of everyone’s perceived gender identities, and that they weren’t subjected to colonial oppression—much less colonially repressing others!