Descrizione principale (Inglese)

In this project, we aimed to reconstruct the palaeo-geographic configuration of the former land bridge between southeastern Sicily and Malta/Gozo, an area of the central Mediterranean that was completely exposed during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 26.5 to 19 kyrs BP). This period is defined as the most recent time when Northern Hemisphere continental ice sheets reached their maximum extent and sea level was at its lowest (about -130 m), as evidenced by numerous proxy records. The melting of the ice sheets began around 20–18 kyrs BP and caused a progressive rise in sea level, and by around 13 kyrs ago, according to current reconstructions, the terrestrial connection between Malta and Sicily had disappeared. The two landmasses are now separated by more than 90 kilometers of water. The most fascinating question is who may have traveled through this landscape during periods in which Malta and Sicily were connected by land. It is quite plausible that this corridor provided a route for the dispersal of animals and, at least in principle, human populations as well. But here the story becomes more complicated. For a long time, Malta was thought to have remained essentially uninhabited until the Neolithic, around 7,500 years ago. That interpretation has recently been challenged by evidence for the presence of hunter-gatherers on Malta around 8,500 years ago. By then, however, the land bridge to Sicily had already disappeared, and Malta was once again in a geographical configuration much closer to that of today. This means that the new map of the land bridge cannot automatically be read as a map of the first human route to Malta. And that is precisely what makes it so interesting. The question is no longer simply “Did humans cross the land bridge?” It becomes much broader: “How did human populations interact with this landscape as the land bridge itself was transformed into a sea?” For the people who inhabited this region, the Mediterranean was not yet a barrier. It was a landscape in transformation. There is another reason why this region deserves attention. Its position between Sicily, Malta, North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean makes it a geographical hinge at the center of the Mediterranean. During periods of low sea level, the exposed land transformed the central Mediterranean into a network of plains, coastlines, uplands, and corridors. Movement could take place along routes that are now impossible to recognize without reconstructing the detailed submerged topography. During the cruise conducted aboard the R/V “Gaia Blu” from 25 August to 1 September in both the Italian and Maltese waters, we have collected new high-resolution geophysical data (Multibeam echosounder and high- resolution seismic profiles) and recovered sediment box corers and gravity corers, on which we will perform laboratory analyses and radiocarbon measurements on carbonate biogenic fraction, to constrain the position of the paleo-shoreline during the LGM.