Did the Romans hunt whales in the Mediterranean?
Commercial whaling, which until now was believed to have begun with Basque whalers around 1000 AD, led to the extinction of right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) and gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) in the Northeast Atlantic.
An international team, including researchers from the CNRS and the University of Montpellier, used new molecular analysis techniques to study whale bones from archaeological sites of Roman fish-salting factories in the Strait of Gibraltar. The team demonstrated that2,000 years ago, gray whales and right whales were present in the Mediterranean, likely to breed there. This discovery, published on July 11, 2018, in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, significantly expands the known historical range of these two whale populations and raises the possibility that a forgotten Roman whaling industry may have contributed to their disappearance.
Photo: D. Bernal – Casasola, University of Cádiz (CC BY-SA license)
Two species of whales in the Mediterranean
Molecular analyses of ancient bones reveal that two species of whales, now absent from the Mediterranean, were likely common there during the Roman period, about 2,000 years ago. The study, conducted by an interdisciplinary team of ecologists, archaeologists, and geneticists, was published on July 11, 2018, in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
The two species are the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), virtually exterminated after centuries of hunting and surviving today as a critically endangered population off the East Coast of North America; and the gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), which has completely disappeared from the North Atlantic and is now restricted to the North Pacific. Prior to this study, the Mediterranean Sea was considered to lie outside the historical range of these two species.
The bones were found in the Strait of Gibraltar region by a team of archaeologists fromthe University of Cádiz, led by Darío Bernal-Casasola, a co-author of this study. Both species are migratory, and their presence east of Gibraltar is a strong indication that they entered the Mediterranean to give birth. During the Roman period, the Gibraltar region was at the center of a massive fish processing industry, whose products were exported throughout the Roman Empire. The ruins of hundreds of factories, complete with large salting ponds, can still be seen in the region today. “The Romans were extremely efficient at exploiting marine resources, including large fish such as tuna,” says Professor Bernal-Casasola, “so we wondered if they might also have exploited whales.”
The discovery of right whales and gray whales in the region lends credence to this hypothesis. “The Romans did not have the technology needed to catch the large whales found in the Mediterranean today, which are deep-sea species,” says Ana Rodrigues, a researcher at the CNRS and lead author of the study. “But right whales and gray whales, along with their calves, must have come very close to the coast—even visible from land—and thus represented tempting prey for local fishermen.” Both species could be caught using small rowboats and hand-held harpoons, just as Basque whalers did centuries later.
DNA identification
The identification of the bones was made possible by molecular techniques involving ancient DNA and collagen fingerprinting. “Counterintuitively, whales are often overlooked in archaeological studies because their bones are often too fragmented to be identifiable by shape, ” says Camilla Speller, co-author of the study, an archaeologist and geneticist at the University of York. “So these recent molecular methods open new windows onto past ecosystems.”
The knowledge that coastal whale species were present in the Mediterranean sheds new light on ancient historical sources. For example , “we can finally understand the first-century description by the famous Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder of orcas attacking whales and their calves in the Bay of Cádiz, ” says Anne Charpentier, associate professor at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Montpellier and co-author of the article. “This scene doesn’t match anything existing there today, but it fits perfectly with the ecology of right whales and gray whales.”
The authors of this study are calling on historians and archaeologists to reexamine their findings in light of this discovery, taking into account the fact that coastal whales were part of the Mediterranean marine ecosystem and may have formed the basis of a Roman whaling industry. “It seems incredible that we lost, and then forgot, two large whale species in a region as well-studied as the Mediterranean,” says Ana Rodrigues. “It makes us wonder what else we might have forgotten.”