Seaborne colonisation with livestock
Navegación de cabotaje con transporte de ganado
- Date
- c. 8500 BCE · confidence medium
- Place
- Shillourokambos and Kissonerga-Mylouthkia, Cyprus
- Credited to
- PPNB settlers from the northern Levant
- Field
- Movement
What it is
Sea transport of entire families with sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, fallow deer and cats, plus seeds, from the Syrian coast to Cyprus (70 km of open sea). The first proof of watercraft capable of carrying large animals.
No boats survive; they are inferred from the introduced fauna.
What it led to
- Maritime colonisation of islands and the spread of the Neolithic package across the Mediterranean
- Sea trade in Anatolian obsidian
- Introduction of domestic fauna into island ecosystems
Built on
- Cattle domestication (aurochs)c. 8500 BCE
- Goat domesticationc. 8000 BCE
- Palaeolithic rafts and canoes
Made possible
- Reed boat sealed with bitumenc. 5300 BCE
- Megalithic templec. 3600 BCE
- Sail and sailing boatc. 3500 BCE
- Neolithic colonisation of Crete and the Aegean