World's Oldest Boat Found in Desert By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Pieces of the Boat June 17 — The world's oldest known boat, built 7,000 years ago out of tarry, bitumen-covered slabs, has been found in an unlikely place: the Kuwaiti desert. If the assessment of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists is correct, the slabs, found covered on one side with barnacles and warehoused in a stone building at a site called As-Sabiyah, would push back the date for the oldest known boat by more than 2,000 years. According to an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian...