Posted on 05/20/2008 6:57:41 PM PDT by blam
Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?
Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.
by Heather Pringle
Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the worlds leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newbornand perhaps just as anxious as he shows me one of his latest prize finds.
The little tree in my hand is a dart head fashioned from creamy-brown chert and bristling with tiny barbs designed to lodge in the flesh of marine prey. Erlandson recently collected dozens of these little stemmed points from San Miguel Island, a scrap of land 27 miles off the coast of California. Radiocarbon dating of marine shells and burned twigs at the site shows that humans first landed on San Miguel at least 12,000 years ago, and the dart head in my hand holds clues to the ancestry of those seafarers. Archaeologists have recovered similar items scattered along the rim of the North Pacific, and some have even been found in coastal Peru and Chile. The oldest appeared 15,600 years ago in coastal Japan. To Erlandson, these miniature trees look like a trail left by mariners who voyaged along the stormy northern coasts of the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Americas during the last Ice Age. We havent published the evidence for this hypothesis yet, and Im kind of nervous about it, he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at discovermagazine.com ...
There have been several variations on that over the years.
--There was oriental pottery unearthed in Equador a number of decades ago.
--One of Thor Heyerdahl's early ideas involved Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders reaching British Columbia.
--Just recently comes the idea that the Chumash canoe (along the Santa Barbara channel) originated in the Polynesian area. Here is a link for this idea.
Try this one http://www.foteviken.se/sewnboat/part1/part1.htm
Just to recall, this piece was published back when they still thought nautical terms and technology had been passed on from German speaking people to the Sa'ami.
We now know it was the other way around with even some grammatical practices in the Sa'ami languages having found themselves firmly lodged in the German languages.
These "sewn boats" are actually plank boats curved against a sort of proto-frame, and tied in place through holes drilled at regular intervals.
The discovery sites of the most ancient extant boats occur in upland sites throughout Scandinavia. Total wrecks are found in the estuaries. The implication is that the boats were built in the mountains, used, sold down river, and finally put to work in the Actic Ocean, a very unforgiving environment.
The fundamental hullshape and ribbing designs are translated to the early Indo-Europeans (aka Vikings) at some period of time. The boats were scaled up and turned into the typical seagoing ships used by the Vikings.
This piece gives a good idea of what might well have been an Ice Age boat design. The writer, though, seems to think this design was the step up from dugouts ~ even though there were no trees large enough to be "dug out" in the Sapmai!
One important point for archaeologists should be that improved boat designs in Scandinavia came about first at an early age INLAND for use on wild glacier rivers and streams. Those boats were then modified for use in the far gentler ocean.
“sewn-plank boats” were a world wide design. The question is where were they first developed.
Sewn boats of the North: A preliminary catalogue with introductory comments.
Boats being sewn in the inner Finnish area, from a woodcut in Olaus Magnus (1539, 1555)
AND if one tribe could take a boat and cross the Bering Straight, it would make sense many could.
As I understand it, the prevailing theory is that the Bering Straight crossing was by land, and around 12,000- 13,000 BC. The problems for researchers right now is reconciling the fact that it appears the glaciers prevented most further south and eastward movement until 11,000 to 10,000 BC or so, with other findings ndicating that humans were present in South America in 12,500. I've read some speculate that the early arrivals could have traveled south via raft or canoe, but up to now this has been viewed skeptically.
-Capt. Jack Sparrow, speaking for all sailors of every age.
No more. The boat/raft theory/idea seems to have become quite popular in the last few years.
Argh, now I did it. Straight=Strait
Slow and steady I am.
I'll get there eventually to the place where the Masters roam.
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Thanks Blam. Repeat? I dunno, and I'm too close to bedtime to check. ;') |
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This is interesting. This puts humans in the techology arena early in our evolution. It also may explain our curious need for lots of fresh water, relative to other critters, since on coasts, this would be less of a selective factor.
No wonder the neanders couldn’t keep up. Pity, since they would be great for selling auto insurance today.
He ought to be nervous. There are entrenched academics whose careers are cemented in the theory that the earliest humans came overland no ealier than 12,ooo years ago. And they like to destroy the careers of those who challenge them.
Roger that. When I think of what it took for the Vikings to set to sea... in tiny "ships" that were mere storm-bait without even the slightest of conveniences... I cannot imagine my own generation doing something of the kind.
And yet they travelled and traded with the world.
Why go by boat when you can FLY?
As our technology and expanding scopes of our civilization allow us to explore and expand the edges of archeological inquiry, we’ll discover more and more instances where human kind rose above the “noble savagery” that we equate with ancient times and achieved more than we give them credit for.
Our pre-formed ideas about the primitive man don’t give enough credit to the intelligence and curiosity that is inherent in our species. I give more credit to our current civilizations achievements to the relative stability of our climate over the last 6 thousand years than to any improvements in our overall intelligence. And we aren’t any less likely to become the next civilized victim of climate change at the rate we’re going... Carbon credits aren’t going to hold back the seas if the seas should rise, or if the climate changes in the other direction, carbon credits aren’t going to warm our homes in the ultra-long winters or feed our children.
Well I went to college after 1970’s but that wasn’t the way it was taught, and my college was in top ten at the time.
However they got here is what it is, and not something I would argue about..just interesting that it sounded like some NEW discovery and I did not equate it as anything new.
The idea was not taught until more recently. Harrison was a student at UCLA in the '60s, and had the idea in his dissertation. There was no evidence to go anywhere with it. Fladmark was writing from British Columbia, and again there was no data to support the idea for a while.
In the '90s the idea began to be supported from a number of places, including the increasingly old dates in both North and South America, and the reduction in the age of the ice free corridor. Pretty soon those two events crossed, and the early coastal migration had to be taken seriously.
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