Archaeologists have discovered evidence of a now-submerged land bridge along Turkey’s Aegean coast that may have served as a crucial pathway for early human migration from Asia to Europe during the Ice Age. The revelation challenges long-held assumptions about how our ancestors first reached European soil, suggesting they didn’t simply travel the traditional northern routes through the Middle East, but also island-hopped across a prehistoric landscape that has since vanished beneath the Mediterranean waves. This extraordinary find not only rewrites the map of human migration but also illuminates a lost world where vast coastal plains, freshwater resources, and continuous landmasses provided ancient peoples with opportunities to spread across continents in ways we never imagined possible.
The discovery emerged from a two-week archaeological survey conducted in June 2022 along the picturesque Aegean coastline of Ayvalık in western Turkey. Led by a team of female researchers, the expedition uncovered 138 prehistoric stone tools spanning multiple Paleolithic periods, providing the first concrete evidence that this region once served as a dynamic corridor for human movement between continents. The report of their extraordinary findings has recently been published in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology.