Ice mystery: did prehistoric humans live in Antarctica?

During the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, Antarctica was a very different place. Tropical forests were growing along the coast, and even the long winters did not deter the dinosaurs. However, IFLScience writes that those hot days were already history by the time humans like our ancient relatives Homo erectus emerged.

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Despite its stable position relative to other continents, Antarctica was not a hospitable place, even during the warm seasons known as interglacial periods. These warm times would have been the worst period for human colonization due to high sea levels, making the waters around Antarctica a greater barrier than they are today.

Contrary to what some people think, there is no evidence of ancient civilizations with advanced technology beneath the Antarctic ice. There are no signs hidden by the so-called “great archaeology”. However, this does not mean that human contact with Antarctica began with Europeans.

The extraordinary skill of the Polynesian sailors who reached such distant places as New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands, and Rapa Nui suggests that they might not have found much larger, if more inhospitable, land further south.

Dr Priscilla Wehey from the University of Otago led the study to investigate Māori’s connection to Antarctica. Experts revealed that the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, were aware of the existence of the continent.

Whales, which have an important place in Maori culture, feed off the Antarctic coast and migrate north to breed. Stories of sailor Hui Te Rangiora, who took a boat into the distant Southern Ocean, possibly following migrating whales, date back about 1,400 years.

Although we don’t know for sure how close they came to Antarctica, the name “Te tai-uka-a-pia” meaning “frozen ocean” implies that they encountered glaciers and perhaps the continent itself.

Interestingly, the distance from Tierra del Fuego to the Antarctic Peninsula is less than the distance from New Zealand to East Antarctica. Challenging previous beliefs, recent research suggests that Native Americans may have visited the Falkland Islands in the 14th century. This raises the possibility that humans would reach Antarctica long before European exploration.

Important

However, these statements are not generally accepted and there is no reliable evidence for this. The Drake Passage, the dangerous waterway between the South Shetland Islands and South America, is a major obstacle. It is approximately 800 kilometers wide, less than twice the distance between the Falkland Islands and the South American mainland.

Even if people had reached these islands and established settlements with the technology of that time, it was unlikely that Antarctica would have become more attractive to them.

After all, although it’s possible that humans knew about Antarctica before the Age of Exploration and even set foot there, there’s no concrete evidence of that yet, and they certainly didn’t stay there very long.

Archeology in Antarctica today focuses primarily on the legacy of 19th- and 20th-century explorers, leaving the possibility that earlier visitors were largely buried in the icy depths of time.

Previously Focus He wrote about the garden cities of the Amazon. Researchers have discovered traces of lost civilizations from pre-Columbian times.

We also wrote where Nicolaus Copernicus is buried. Scientists were unable to find his remains for centuries until a team of Polish scientists succeeded.