The Great Pyramid already glistened majestically by the Nile, the city states of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley were flourishing and Stonehenge sat imposingly on the Salisbury Plain. From Ireland’s wild west coast to Australia to the Americas, the human species had spread far and wide. Yet, in the middle of the third millennium BC, there was still one place in Europe where humans had yet to make their mark: the mysterious, forested and uninhabited Balearic Islands.
How humans eventually got there, and when, has remained an enigma and the subject of heated debate until recently. But thanks to advances in radiocarbon dating and genome sequencing, we are now beginning to get a clearer picture of those first humans of Mallorca.
“It’s a bit like the quest for the Holy Grail,” says archaeologist Javier Aramburu-Zabala. “That just about sums up the race among scientists to pin down the very first human presence in the Balearic Islands: our very own island Adam and Eve.”
Our Adams and Eves likely used Ibiza as a stepping stone to reach the earthly paradise of Mallorca. Under certain weather conditions, Ibiza is just about visible from the eastern coast of Iberia. But the distance is 90 km, so making the perilous journey into the unknown would have required certain technologies and maritime navigation skills.
They may have used reed rafts or dugout canoes like the ones found under Lake Bracciano in Italy. These are 7,000 years old. Alternatively, they may have plied the waves in leather canoes. like those used by the indigenous peoples of North America, or reed boats. Summer was when the weather was best for sailing, but the high temperatures would have reduced visibility. It was not a voyage to be taken lightly.
Ancient Greeks and Romans thought that the first inhabitants of our islands were exiles from Troy or companions of Hercules, and medieval Christians believed a grandson of Noah washed up here after the Flood. Of course, modern archaeologists had their own theories. In the 1980s, the Deià-based US archaeologist Wiliam Waldren proposed approximately 5000-5500 BC as the likely date of the first human arrivals on the islands.
They settled down, he said, like many modern arrivals, in Valldemossa and Sóller. At least that’s where he found what he thought to be compelling evidence of human settlement, namely signs of an attempted domestication of the now-extinct goat-like antelope Myotragus. The island was teeming with these docile, foeless creatures – and they would have provided seemingly endless supplies of meat for the first humans. For Waldren, the absence of pottery fragments suggested a very early human landfall, around 5500 BC and he wondered if these first Mallorcans might have been fishermen from the mainland, blown off course and marooned on the island. By 1995, archaeologist Victor Guerrero and his team had pushed back human presence here even further, to around 7220 BC based on excavations in a remote cave near Esporles. There, in a cave the bones of Myotragus had markings that suggested they may have been butchered by humans. There were also ashes, suggesting the use of fire.
Not so fast, other archaeologists say. The ashes may be the result of forest fires, the scratches on the bones caused by other animals. Some, including Aramburu-Zabala ask why, if there were merely a handful of humans on the island, they would need to seek refuge in a difficult cave when there are plenty of nicer ones nearby. Evidence from the Muleta cave, near Sóller, had prompted Waldren to posit his 5000 BC date. Here, at the bottom of a shaft were Myotragus bones that showed signs of the work of a human butcher. But the bones turned out to belong to a more prosaic goat, and supposed hand-crafted needles turned out to be mere bones, said a later team of archaeologists led by Josep Antoni Alcover. And human bones found there turned out to be from around 2500 BC. Waldren’s conclusions from the Son Matge cave in Valldemossa were also subsequently questioned by Alcover. Marks on the animal bones were caused by other animals, probably rodents, he argued. Supposed buttons turned out to be pigs’ teeth.
Pollen analysis shows that areas of Mallorca and Menorca were gradually occupied by crop plants between 3000 and 2000 BC, clear indicators of human activity. By 2000 BC, much of Menorca was deforested. Meanwhile the fate of the Myotragus is a vital piece of evidence: unable to defend itself it would likely have been hunted to extinction within 200 years of human arrival, say experts. If we can date the last Myotragus bones, we will be closer to understanding when humans turned up on the scene. It’s likely that there were still Myotragus on the island around 3690 BC.
And if we accept that Ibiza was the first of the stepping stones, human colonization had to have been much later. The earliest evidence of human settlement there dates from between 2100 and 1900 BC. Crunching the numbers, Aramburu-Zabala posited a date of around 2300 BC. “We don’t know for certain where the first people came from, but the first ones to leave a trace – dolmen-like tombs – would likely have been from the south of France or the northern Catalan coast,” surmises the archaeologist.
Meanwhile, a vast international investigation decided to look at the DNA evidence of the oldest-known human remains. The research, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution in 2020, established that the oldest inhabitants of the Balearic Islands were most probably descended from Bronze Age nomadic herders who had swept over the Pyrenees into Iberia from Asia, Central Europe and the steppes of what’s now Russia, around 4,000 years ago, and who had an advantage over the original Stone Age inhabitants. From there they ventured out to sea to the islands. Others crossed over into North Africa and from there into Sicily: a genetic link has been found between the remains of individuals in Iberia and in both Mallorca and the Italian island.
“The archaeological and genetic evidence agrees that the Bronze Age was a period of unprecedented cultural exchanges. This study thus confirms that the Mediterranean was an initial ‘highway’, a place of communication and trading among the peoples bathed by its waters”, says Carles Lalueza-Fox, principal researcher at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology.
The research team recovered the genome of three Balearic individuals in the laboratory from remains found in three sites. The individual from the Cova des Moro (Manacor) is the oldest found to date in the whole of the Balearic Islands, and is about 4,300 years old, coinciding with Aramburu-Zabala’s date of 2300 BC .
Perhaps the newcomers on the mainland had been slightly too successful, with their growing population outpacing resources. “It’s likely that they were pushed here by hunger that was bad enough to encourage them to take the risk of crossing the sea. If food had been plentiful on the mainland, there would have been no reason to embark with your family for a distant land. So it was only when the east coast of Spain was densely populated, that the Balearic Islands were colonized,” says Aramburu-Zabala
For Lalueza-Fox, a voyage to the Balearics may have been prompted by trade: “It must not be forgotten that the Balearic Islands can be seen from some points of the Catalan coast, and perhaps some local merchants were tempted to explore the territory”, he points out.
Whatever the reasons for embarking on that momentous voyage, the first humans of Mallorca were soon thriving – tending cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, planting cereals and hunting and fishing. The stage was set for a dramatic new phase in Mallorca’s exciting story – the great, monumental stone and tower constructions of the so-called Naviform and Talayotic Ages. But that would be 1,000 years later, a millennium after the first Mallorcan took that eventful first voyage.
