A new ground-breaking research which has pushed Malta’s history by a whole millennium has dominated national headlines ever since it was unveiled last night. But what does it all mean, and what have researchers just stumbled upon?

After excavations started in 2019 at the Latnija cave in Mellieħa, led by Professors Eleanor Scerri and Nicholas Vella, the team sent several findings to be analysed by lab work to back the initial interpretations.

Scerri delves into the process of arriving to the conclusion that Malta’s earliest human presence can be traced back 1,000 years earlier than previous knowledge saying that “as a scientist, the first thing you want to do when you realise something amazing is to try and disprove it.” After conducting thorough analysis’ and trying to look at the evidence from all the angles, Scerri claimed that “when you get enough data, evidence, lab analysis, it starts to formulate a picture that you cannot reject.”

This newly-discovered civilisation of early island inhabiters are completely different to the farmers from pre-history, in fact, the people living in the mesolithic era had no domestication of items and animals. They were very careful in the management of resources as seen from their hugely diverse diet which included birds and marine resources, which is a completely different from a farmer diet that was seen from the prehistory era. These findings are largely thanks to the Stratigraphic sequence found at the excavation which included chemical fingerprinting of bone fragments. We’re lucky enough that these ancient deposits remained untouched largely due to the collapse of the roof in the cave which sealed everything beneath for archaeologists to uncover.