Posted on 03/04/2025 10:25:24 PM PST by SunkenCiv
According to a statement released by Ateneo de Manila University, new research suggests that prehistoric people living in the Philippines and Island Southeast Asia may have had the capability of building sophisticated seafaring boats far earlier than expected. The study challenges the widely held contention that advances in boatbuilding technology during the Paleolithic era only took place in Europe and Africa. The researchers argue that places such as the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste were never connected to the mainland during this period, yet somehow contain evidence of human occupation. Analysis of 40,000-year-old stone tools excavated at sites across these regions has also yielded traces of plant processing, indicating that human inhabitants were able to extract the plant fibers necessary for making ropes and bindings that were essential in the construction of sturdy boats. The skeletal remains of deep ocean fish including sharks and tuna, as well as fishing implements such as hooks and weights, also indicate that these humans had offshore seafaring skills. Therefore, experts speculate that prehistoric migrations across Island Southeast Asia were not undertaken solely by passive drifters in flimsy bamboo rafts, but by highly skilled navigators in technologically advanced vessels.
(Excerpt) Read more at archaeology.org ...
“So for over 200 thousand years our species was smart enough to invent writing but didn’t until the last 5 thousand years or so?”
Didn’t need it, primitive survival does not require written language. If your father teaches you orally and manually the fine art of cabinet making as an apprentice so that you can survive and carry on the trade does it need to be documented or it never happened? You can’t make cabinets because you have no written certification from an educational institute?
Would you even want the secrets of the trade skills documented so that competition could use them against you and your own survival advantage handed down to you from your father with hands on experience? We even practice this today. Everyday knowledge, experience, and trade secrets are shared without one bit of written language.
Interesting. So our obvious talent at it was not at all a useful thing evolutionarily speaking...and yet it evolved anyway...
“I want to be a pirate like the Pirates of Penzance!..............
People Irving by the sea were seafarers? Is this supposed to be a shock?
Or the fact that they tied two logs together and went into the harbor to catch better fish is causing people pause? I am sure the guys who brought back food got to have wives and make babies. That’s quite an incentive.
That song is almost 50 years old and I’ve never heard that joke. And its so obvious….Thanks for the laugh.
Oral tradition goes back long long before the written word. And it is accurate history or knowledge even without being in writing. Take the Australian Aborigines for example. They are taught history through generational song and dance from a very young age. And it is absolutely imperative to them that the songs and dance are perfectly accurate with no mistakes or personal edits. To change them in even the slightest is taboo. So the history they share now with no written language is absolutely accurate from when the song and dance was first created thousands of years ago. So no written language is needed.
Ever judge a singer for how well they copy the song of an original artist? And that you very rarely say “She/he nailed it!”. This is how accurate generational oral history without writing can actually be. It is orally documented and it must be absolutely perfect before the previous generation all pass.
Ah, well that makes our ability to read and write even more curious.
I have often wondered why it actually started based on the fact it is not really needed to survive . There were millions of farmers and fishermen and stockmen who never learned to read or write and survived just fine.
I think it may have started with currency, accounting, and commercial exchange when it became larger scale. Written accounting was a need for this as documented proof. Then religion and documented law...
Here is something interesting. Native American tribes had their own unique dialects per tribe even though the languages were similar. One tribe had trouble communicating with other tribes. These dialects defined the boundaries of tribal territories. But... They had a non oral sign language that was pretty much universal continent wide.
Not all of them were named Irving. :^)
Maybe you should, because they weren’t connected.
“Or the fact that they tied two logs together and went into the harbor to catch better fish is causing people pause?”
The one that gets me is the myth that Native Americans were ignorant primitives because they “didn’t have the wheel”. Of course they understood the principle of the wheel. They played rolling hoop games and ball games and I’m sure at some point they watched rocks roll down hills.
They just didn’t have a need for it so they never wasted time or calories to utilize it. Wheels require roads, building roads require burning huge amounts of precious survival calories.
Same with “still in the stone age”. Metal requires huge amounts of calories and infrastructure to mine, smelt, and cast or forge the metal to a finished product.
Why when they could just reach down and pick up a rock and shape it into a very functional weapon point in half an hour no matter where they happened to be. Which is actually more sensible and practical?
The conventional view is that Australia was peopled by those arriving by sea. Then there was no seafaring for 47,000 years, and about 1000 BC others figured it out. Then no one caught on to what they were doing until European mariners arrived about 400 years ago.
The earliest artifacts on SE Asian islands are circa 700K old. The people or human ancestors who made them didn’t walk there.
Fits perfectly with what I have believed most of my life... also believe trans-Atlantic seafaring was common for millennia. We will all be long gone before ‘science’ comes to this realization. 🤷
Writing systems probably came and went a number of times, beginning as rudimentary recordkeeping or labeling systems, and became more sophisticated as part of accounting systems (y’know, because taxes are inevitable ;^).
The rub is, a lot of text will have been on transitory materials such as leaves. Dravidian texts on large leaves only go back to the Middle Ages, probably copied from earlier versions. Papyrus scrolls have survived to an extent, mostly in Egyptian sands, but they’ve partly crumbled away. The oldest surviving text of a small part of The Odyssey is at Oxford, and I think that one was a mummy wrapping that had been recycled in Roman times. The Oxyrhynchus papyri appear to have been chucked into a trash pit.
More pertinent for this topic, a ship’s manifest on papyrus survived in or near the ruins of one of the Roman Red Sea ports, showing Hermapollon, a large Roman ship, carried about 620 tons of pepper.
The oldest writing that is known about now, but not readable, is found among the European cave paintings.
The Vinca characters (SE Europe) are up to 7300 years old (last ones around 3500 BC) and found inscribed on surviving ceramic bowls and such. Those inscriptions possibly represent a labeling system (”soup” “cheese” ;^), could be the artisan’s initials or signature, etc.
Earliest known fired clay objects are also from Europe and go back about 28K years, but there’s no known writing or even paint on them. Carved stone objects go back as much as 400K years but no apparent writing on them.
The supposed maritime barriers are imaginary, and part of an ideology. History is written by the landlubbers. :^)
Thanks for informative comment.
Interesting and coincidental tidbit. Just yesterday I was researching sail designs and efficiency of sail designs. Turns out the ancient Crab Claw sails of Oceania are one of the simplest and most efficient sail designs even when compared to modern sails.
all the maps I saw showing Asia 40,000 ya show them connected - maybe you have different maps?
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