This is the third post in my series on the routes that could have been used by ancestral hominins like Homo erectus and also by Homo sapiens to migrate out of Africa (OOA). In today's post we will look into the Strait of Sicily.
Post 1: Where was the Out of Africa Corridor?
Post 2: OOA Routes: Gibraltar
Post 3: OOA Routes: Strait of Sicily
Post 4: OOA Routes: Sinai
Post 5: OOA Routes: Bab-el-Mandeb
Strait of Sicily
Nowadays this corridor is dismissed and not even mentioned as an option for human migration out of, or into Africa (see Oppenheimer, 2012).
The strait separating Tunisia in Africa, from the island of Sicily, Italy, Europe, is a viable route for migration across the Mediterranean Sea from North Africa into the insular region of Italy, and then, crossing the strait of Messina (~3km - 2 mi) from Northern Sicily, accessing the tip of the Italian "boot" on mainland Europe.
The crossing, now used by illegal migrants into the European Union, is some 145 km wide (90 mi.) Too wide to see Sicily from Africa. However, there are some Italian islands in the strait: Pantelleria 77 km - 48 mi. from Africa and 104 km - 65 mi. from Sicily. It is 135 km (84 mi.) from Tunez to Lampedusa, another 44 km (27 mi.) to Linosa, and 122 km - 75 mi. to Malta and Gozo, from there to Sicily it is 85 km - 52 mi.
This is a wide strait, and would require navigation skills to cross it, with current sea levels. However, sea levels were far lower during the Ice Ages of the past 2 million years, and now submerged continental shelf areas were dry land at that time.
A 100 meter drop (330 feet) in the water level of the Mediterranean would have exposed banks that are now submerged, like the Adventure Bank, or Adventure Plateau, on the southern coast of Sicily, that spans 80,000 km2 or 30,090 sq. mi. On this bank is shallow area known as Pantelleria Vecchia (Old Pantelleria) which can be seen in th following map, adapted from Galili, 1981. It shows the coast exposed if sea levels dropped 100 meters (black line).
A submerged 12-meter (36 foot) long megalithic monolith ( an obelisk-like stone slab) was discovered on the seabed at Pantelleria Vecchia, it weighs 15 tons, and now lies under 40 meters (120 feet) of water. This shows that neolithic people lived here when it was emerged land. Lodolo and Ben-Avraham, 2023 note that "seawater inundated the inner lands at 9350 ± 200 year B.P., the upper limit which can be reasonably taken for the site abandonment. This discovery provides evidence for a significant Mesolithic human activity in the Sicilian Channel region."
We know (see Scerri, 2025) that late stone age people crossed from Sicily to Malta some 8,500 years ago in simple boats. But, it could have been accessed on foot, as the continental shelf linking Malta to Sicily was dry land during the Last Glacial Maximum (25 kya). Neanderthal teeth were discovered in the Għar Dalam Cave, in Malta by Despott, and reported by Keith, 1918 (more on Keith further down). However, mainstream scholars say they are more recent, and belong to modern humans. The controversy lives on (read more.
Why cross the sea here?
From the coast of Tunisia, you can spot the volcanic summits of Pantelleria on clear days (see this image), which could have enticed ancient explorers to go there. From Pantelleria it is a short crossing to the then emerged Adventure Bank (36 km - 20 mi.)
Opinions against this corridor
Villa, 2001 summarizes the points against this corridor without completely disregarding it, as follows: "In view of the endemic faunas of the Lower and early Middle Pleistocene, the uncertain context of Lower Paleolithica artifacts, the absence of verifed reports of Mousterian industries in Sicily (Mussi, 1992, p. 288), the absence of human remains before the Upper Paleolithic, and the tectonic history of the island and adjacent areas, we must conclude that Sicily is unlikely to have been an important connecting point between Africa and Italy until the Upper Paleolithic." (highlighting is mine).
The French school of archaeologists was more favorable to this corridor. Henriette Alimen (1900-1996) propsed that Acheulean Africans reached Europe through Gibraltar and the Tunisia-Sicily Strait (Alimen, MH (1975). Les "isthmes" hispano-marocain et siculo-tunisien aux temps acheuléens. L'Anthropologie, 79 (3), pp. 399-436.
Rolland, 1992 is also cautious about "The Siculo- Tunisian landbridge" he regards the pebble tools and the matching Pebble-Culture in the Maghreb as unconfirmed, and notes that Italy's mainland was a narrow and complex geography that was subjected to great changes during the Ice Ages. Furthermore, the Mediterranean and the Alps tended to isolate it. The most likely route for entry into Italy, according to Rolland, was from the east, via the Adriatic and Ionian seas' shelves, as attested by Early Paleolithic sites in that region.
Nevertheless, there is evidence of Acheulean tools, 700,000 years old, from Notarchirico in Southern Italy, see Moncel, 2020, (highlight is mine): "the location of Notarchirico in southern Italy suggests two possible paleogeography-dependent routes: (1) following the northern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea from the Levant during low sea levels in glacial phases, or (2) crossing the Sicily channel between Tunisia and Sicily, also during glacial periods with low sea levels.Given the evidence of probable hominin occupation of insular land masses in the Mediterranean during the Lower Paleolithic (Crete, Gavdos, and Naxos), along withrecent discoveries of evidence of settlement on Indonesian and Philippine Islands east of the Wallace line in Southeast Asia as early as 700 ka, the Sicilian route deserves consideration, in spite of the absence of solid evidence of a land bridge."
The following map, from Depraetere, 2025 shows the region as it stood arond 20,000 years ago, with the emerged land, and modern shores (on the lower right side in color, are the shelve regions currently submerged):
Grimaldi Cave, and the Khoisan in Europe!
Keith, mentioned further up, regarding the Maltese Neanderthal teeth, believed that primitive Africans, related to the Bushmen (now known as Khoisan or San) reached Europe via Gibraltar or Sicily, and settled there, while Neanderthals and more modern-looking Cromagnons (anatomically modern humans) were native to Europe. The Grimaldi people were an example of the African branch. They discovered in 1901 by the Prince of Monaco in Mentone, Italy, (see Google map) at the lowest level of the Grimaldi Cave, were "of a race which was neither that of Neanderthal nor that of Cro-Magnon. The skeletons... present traits which have been interpreted as Negroid in character. It will be remembered that the Cro-Magnon race, with its Aurignacian culture, is supposed to have entered Europe from Asia by way of northern Africa and the old land-bridges across to Italy. Now in recent years there are coming to light all over Africa remains of a type of art, consisting mainly of engravings and paintings of animals, which in many ways recall the remarkable cave art of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. In South Africa works of this character are attributed in part to those dwarfish, yellow-skinned, woolly-haired little hunters, the Bushmen, themselves undoubtedly a very ancient race, now nearly extinct. Moreover, cer- tain of the physical peculiarities of the latter people are shown clearly in the figures of very stout nude women, carved from ivory or soft stone, which have been found here and there in the Upper Paleolithic of Europe. These facts, taken in conjunction with the Negroid traits ascribed to the two Grimaldi skeletons just mentioned, seem to hint at some African influence on Aurignacian art. Any more definite conclusion than this, however, we should hardly be justified in drawing as yet." (see p. 78 in Bishop, 1930)
The Grimaldi man and woman, are from the Late Paleolithic and lived 22,000 to 26,0000 years ago. They were modern humans. It is interesting that these ancient modern humans in Southern Europe were assumed to be Bushmen, we know that Europeans share the same pale skin pigmentation that Europeans have (see post).
Some like Clyde Winters support interactions between Khoisan and Europe (see his comment on a formal paper) suggesting that the " southern African Khoisan (SAK) population... SAK people were the Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon people of Western Eurasia... By 70 kya Khoisan people probably spread hg N into West Africa... Sometime before 40kya there was probably a second migration event from Cameroon and possibly the Senegambian region into Northwest Africa on into Iberia." Hinting at a Gibraltar Crossing. Note that Winters is African-Centric and also supports an early migration of Africans, who peopled America.
Comments
I rate this corridor as unlikely, even though it is feasible. Perhaps future findings in Sicily will shed more light on the matter.
My next post (#4 in the series) will cover the Sinai, Northern Red Sea Route.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall ©
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