Malta’s Pleistocene Bone Caves

In this video I talk about Malta during the Pleistocence, or the Ice Age. This isn’t about megaliths but it helps us to understand the history of the islands before the early Neolithic settlers arrived. The geological landscape that they found when they made their way to Malta from Sicily, was a result of the drastically different climate that had existed during the Ice Age.

The Pleistocene geological epoch lasted around two million years until around 9600 BCE when the Younger Dryas Period ended. The Younger Dryas was the period of cooling that temporarily put a halt to the warming phase the planet was going through at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum. It would be another three and a half thousand years before early farmers moved to Malta.

Malta's current landscape owes its appearance to the Pleistocene which carved out valleys and caves. It is in caves and bone fissures that many deposits of Pleistocene fauna have been excavated over the years. Intact stratigraphic layers help to see which animals inhabited the islands and when.

The Għar Dalam cave mentioned in this episode has an accompanying museum displaying some of the fossils excavated from there and other sites on the islands. Both the cave and the museum are open to the public.

#fossils #iceage #malta #pleistocene #prehistoric

✨ IN THIS EPISODE

00:00 Introduction
00:16 The Pleistocene
02:36 Għar Dalam
04:16 Other Deposits

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✨ REFERENCES

Fabri, N. (2007). Għar Dalam. The cave, the museum and the garden. Santa Venera: Midsea Books.

French, C., Hunt, C. O., Grima, R., McLaughlin, R., Stoddart, S., & Malone, C. (2020). Temple landscapes: Fragility, change and resilience of Holocene environments in the Maltese Islands. [Book]. 

Gatt, M. (2015). The Maltese Islands during the Quaternary. A holistic review of known terrestrial Pleistocene to Holocene sites and a new faunal complex scheme for Malta, University of Malta, Msida.

Prampolini, M., Foglini, F., Biolchi, S., Devoto, S., Angelini, S. and Soldati, M., 2017. Geomorphological mapping of terrestrial and marine areas, northern Malta and Comino (central Mediterranean Sea). Journal of Maps, 13(2), pp.457-469.

Spratt, T. A. B., (1867). On the Bone-Caves near Crendi, Zebbug, and Melliha, in the Island of Malta. Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, vol. 23, pp. 283-297.

✨ MUSIC CREDIT

Music I Use: https://www.bensound.com/free-music-f...
License code: YD3SKFJMVNDTLWEX

✨ PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Doggerland, credit: Francis Lima
Palaeogeography of the Maltese archipelago during the LGM, credit: Prampolini, M., in paper referenced above.

All other photographs, credit: MegalithHunter