The First People of Malta

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:46:39 +0000

A special episode of Times Talk is revealing an exclusive, first look into a groundbreaking discovery led by two Maltese archaeologists, which has altered the history of Malta and the Mediterranean.

In this episode, professors Eleanor Scerri and Nicholas Vella sit down with Times of Malta to explain how their team unearthed 8,500-year old remains from a cave in Mellieħa that confirmed there were humans in Malta at least a thousand years before the first farmers were thought to have arrived.

The discovery adds another chapter to Malta's prehistory and changes the global scientific community's understanding of the technological capabilities of hunter-gatherer communities at the time.

Earlier this week, just a few days before their discovery was published in one of the world's leading scientific journals Nature, Times Talk was granted access by the archaeologists to the unearthed remains that are now being housed at the University of Malta.

The episode features footage of several bones, stone tools and other human-made remains that led to the discovery, along with interviews with four of the researchers in their laboratory and at the Mellieħa cave where the remains were found.