also in the opening paragraph the peoples are reffered to as “possibily even prehuman” - you will note that the next references drop the “possibily even” and go directly to “prehuman”, as if somehow that has been established as fact in a few paragraphs. More shoddy NYT writing - but the intent is for you to come away with the wrong info.
They are trying to give the impression something besides a human was building boats.
It is thought that boating started 40,000 years ago. Modern man is only 50,000 years old.
The article is about stone artifacts on Crete. Stone shaping started about 2 million years ago.
If the stone artifacts on Crete are 130,000 years old, then they were made by pre-humans. If they are on Crete, then they probably used some type of boat to get there.
If pre-humans had boats, then it’s probable that early humans had boats as well. However, the entire article has nothing to do with humans, so the opening paragraph shouldn’t have said anything about humans. This is anecdotal evidence that pre-humans had boats and means squat for humans.