Around 8000 BC, canoes carved from a single pine log arrived in what is now the Netherlands. The boat, approximately 3 meters long, was not discovered until 1955, when it was excavated from a peat bog near the village of Pesse by road workers. This artifact, now known as the Pesce Canoe, is the world’s oldest physical example of a boat.
However, there is significant indirect evidence that humans have been using boats for much longer than 10,000 years. So when did humans invent ships?
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“There is strong evidence that humans were present in what is now Australia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago,” Faubel told Live Science via email. “This would have required an open ocean voyage between mainland Asia and the Paleocontinent of Sahul (of which Australia was part at the time), so watercraft of some kind must have been in use by at least about 50,000 years ago.”
The evidence in this case does not come from the physical remains of an ancient boat. Instead, it comes from your DNA. A recent study analyzed around 2,500 ancient and modern Aboriginal genomes from across Australia and neighboring countries to investigate when Australia’s population diverged from those of other continents. Their statistical model suggested that northern Australia was first settled around 60,000 years ago. These findings also match contemporary tools and pigments unearthed at excavation sites in Australia.
Other, more controversial archaeological evidence raises the possibility that humans were seafaring long ago.
“There’s some interesting evidence from Greece,” Faubel said. “The Paleolithic stone tools found on Crete have been dated based on the circumstances in which they were found. [at least] 130,000 years ago. Some archaeologists dispute these dates, but if this claim holds up, it would mean that ancient humans traveled there by boat during the mid-Holocene.” Crete is dozens of miles from mainland Greece (and has been an island for about 5 million years).
Some experts believe it will set back the clock on ocean travel by hundreds of thousands of years, if not a million. This means that ships are older than our species.
A 1998 study led by archaeologist Michael Morwood dated stone tools discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores to around 800,000 years ago and concluded that Homo erectus may have used watercraft to get there. Morwood later co-authored a 2010 study that found tools from another site on Flores may have originated 1.02 million years ago, if not earlier. And in a study published in the journal Nature last year, another team of researchers proposed that stone tool fragments found on the nearby Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that ancient human relatives were making tools there at least 1.04 million years ago.
Still, there is much debate about when and how our ancient human relatives arrived on these islands. John Cherry, professor emeritus of archeology at Brown University, said one problem with Cretan stone artifacts is that they are “surface finds” in visible locations above ground, rather than “layered” objects found in separate soil layers. Additionally, “absolute radiometric dating is lacking,” which could shed more light on when the tools were made. If the Crete data “holds up to further scrutiny or we have older data,” we could draw better conclusions, he told LiveScience in an email.
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The Indonesian research is “all very solid,” Cherry told Live Science. However, he hypothesizes that humans may have arrived at Flores and Sulawesi by chance. “Essentially, clumps of vegetated land move away from the mainland during monsoons and river flooding” and are “carried into the ocean itself by ocean currents and winds,” Cherry explained.
He pointed to a 2025 study that suggested some iguanas may have rafted 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) from North America to Fiji.
“We know the same thing has happened in thousands of other species, including primates like monkeys and lemurs, so why doesn’t it happen in humans?” Cherry said. Furthermore, the humans of Flores and Sulawesi were most likely Homo erectus, which “according to the orthodox understanding of human evolution is unlikely.” [H.] “Erectus had the necessary social structure, communication capabilities, or complex additional technology to cross the ocean,” he added.
No matter when ancient humans took to the seas, the question of what drove them there remains. Fauvel has some ideas. One was to look for food.
“Aquatic environments are rich in rich food resources. … It is very likely that many of the early experiments with personal watercraft in lakes, rivers, and estuaries were aimed at fishing and gathering other aquatic food resources,” Faubel said. Boats would also have been “the best tool available for transporting large quantities of material with ease,” such as “the transportation of large animal carcasses from home hunting grounds, or flint and obsidian from quarries.”
And perhaps humans have always had a desire to explore the unknown.
“Throughout human history, there has been a strong tendency to explore new areas, and often such exploration was done by boat,” Faubel said. “If you are moving to a new area with your family, you will likely need to bring a lot of things with you, and the logistical capabilities of a boat will make such a trip much easier.”
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