The floor layers
Half a million years readable as pages.
Jean-Christophe BENOIST — CC BY 2.5 · Plutoworld — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Tranceliner — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Continentaleurope — CC BY-SA 4.0
A pattern repeated on islands: large animals shrink over generations for lack of food and predators while small ones grow — so Malta's elephants became the size of a large dog, and its rodents grew huge.
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"The cave of darkness" in Arabic, and Malta's oldest human trace: Għar Dalam is a hundred and forty-four metres of cave cut by an underground river, its floor layers readable like the pages of a book — each layer an age, the deepest reaching back some five hundred thousand years. What was found in it changed the understanding of the island's history: bones of dwarf elephants, hippopotami, giant deer and tortoises from a time when Malta was joined by land to Sicily and Europe — animals that crossed the land bridge and were trapped when the sea rose, shrinking over generations on a small island. Above them lies the pottery layer carrying the earliest evidence of humans in Malta, around 5200 BC. The museum at the entrance displays the bones ranked in 1940s wooden cases — a historical display in its own right — and then you walk into the cave itself on a lit path for its first fifty metres. The temperature is steady and the visit short, and the site sits near Birżebbuġa bay and its Sunday market.
Half a million years readable as pages.
The display itself now a historical artefact.
Triq Għar Dalam, Birżebbuġa