Malta’s First People Arrived by Boat, Not on Foot

For thousands of years, it was possible to walk from Sicily to Malta without getting your feet wet. By the time anyone we know of actually lived on Malta, that route had been gone for millennia.

A Route That No Longer Exists

Today, more than 90 kilometers of open sea separate Sicily from Malta. During the last Ice Age, global sea levels sat roughly 130 meters lower than today, since huge volumes of water were locked away in ice sheets across the Northern Hemisphere. That drop exposed a broad stretch of seabed connecting the two, according to Italy’s National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics. According to the most widely accepted reconstructions, rising seas submerged this connection around 13,000 years ago, cutting Sicily and Malta off from each other for good.

Mapping the Sunken Land

A research expedition called BRIDGES set out to map what remains of this vanished landscape in detail. Researchers from Italy’s National Research Council, the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics, and the University of Malta spent time aboard the Italian vessel Gaia Blu, surveying the seafloor between southeastern Sicily and the Maltese islands. The expedition, led by Emanuele Lodolo of OGS and Maria Filomena Loreto of CNR-ISMAR, wrapped up in Catania in September 2026. Using high-resolution bathymetric mapping and acoustic instruments capable of examining sediment tens of meters below the seabed, the team produced far more detailed maps than had existed before, despite this stretch of seafloor sitting relatively close to Europe’s coastline.

An Archipelago, Not a Highway

What the surveys revealed wasn’t the simple strip of dry land researchers had expected. Instead, the landscape featured elongated ridges, low-lying depressions, and sheltered basins, more closely resembling a scattered chain of islands separated by narrow channels and shallow lagoons than a single continuous corridor. Researchers identified one particularly intriguing feature along the western edge of the ancient connection: a rough underwater formation that may represent an ancient coral reef, though further study is needed to confirm what it actually is. The team also recovered sediment cores containing ancient marine deposits, which laboratory analysis and radiocarbon dating could use to pin down more precisely when different parts of this landscape disappeared beneath the waves.

A Timeline That Doesn’t Quite Line Up

Here’s where the story gets genuinely puzzling. For years, researchers believed Malta’s earliest inhabitants were Neolithic farmers who arrived around 7,500 years ago. A 2025 study published in Nature pushed that timeline back further, describing hunter-gatherers who lived at Latnija, in northern Malta, roughly 8,500 years ago, leaving behind stone tools, hearths, and food remains including fish, shellfish, and birds. But by the time those hunter-gatherers reached Malta, the land bridge to Sicily had already been underwater for about 4,500 years. That means they had to travel roughly 100 kilometers across open water by boat, demonstrating that Mesolithic communities were capable of substantial sea crossings well before farming ever reached the region. The new seabed maps can’t confirm that anyone crossed the land bridge itself while it still existed. What they do show is a richer, more resource-varied landscape, one with sheltered lagoons and shallow waters that could have supported fish and shellfish, potentially drawing people from Sicily’s coast even if they never made it all the way to Malta.

Sources

This report draws on the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics’s own announcement of the BRIDGES expedition results, and original coverage by Arkeonews.