Uh, no. All they had to do is gather up material that floats for making a boat, store food in watertight containers, and then sail away. That is a far cry from a mission to Mars.
Ah!
Let’s steelman that admittedly stretched analogy.
Let’s say you’re a neolithic hunter-gatherer, with some rudimentary agriculture of sorts. It’s not just finding some stuff that floats, you’ve got to develop the technology to build a boat that can survive pelagic conditions. It’ll probably be some sort of big, double-hull dugout canoe with a bridge-deck of some sort, and some kind of sail power. You’ll have a good knowledge of the night sky already, but you’ll have to apply that to navigation problems so you’re not sailing in circles.
Now for storing food and fresh water — you can’t just put that in a woven wicker basket, the grain will get soaked before you launch your ship, so you have to develop some kind of clay storage vessel (as was discussed in the piece posted).
All of that R+D, with stone, wood, and bone tools, and no math or written language is probably going to take more than one human lifetime, so you’ve got to figure out some way to transmit knowledge for the design team for at least two or three generations, all while fending of enemies, wild animals, and putting food on the hearth while you develop this wild as-yet-unheardof technology.
And yet, it was somehow within reach, but only barely as evidenced by how long it took to get from the mainland to the islands.
We won’t take another thousand years to get to Mars, or other places in the solar system, but is it really a bigger challenge, at least in terms of the human spirit? After all, we know Mars is there, and have a very good idea of what it’s like. We’re just choosing to not go because it’s either too expensive, too much trouble, or we don’t see the payoff.
Surely at least some of these Stone-Age mariners were driven by a spirit of adventure, a quest for glory perhaps, as they set sail into the rising sun?
There is only one way that it might be helpful to compare a pre-historic voyage of over 1,500 miles across the open ocean with our challenge of landing a human on Mars. Both stretch the limits of existing technology and involve great risk to those brave enough to make the attempt. The pre-historic sailor needed so much more than a vessel which could float. He had to have some type of sail and the skill to use it. He needed to navigate far from land without anything aside from his talent of reading the winds and current to guide him. He needed to know how to provision himself for a voyage of uncertain length. Finally, he needed to know how to profit from the voyage; otherwise, there would be no reason to take the many risks involved.
Vert true, actually. We know exactly where Mars is and how to get there. The early Pacific explorers didn’t know where they were going and where they would end up. Easy peasy.