Pleistocene seafaring

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Bricoleur, Dec 1, 2008.

  1. Bricoleur Registered Member

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    98
    This thread is the result of hijacking (or off-subject rambling) of a recent one by Common_Sense_Seeker, about a theory of comets causing landbridges. I subscribe more to migration via traditional means, ie watercraft. Apologies if it has been covered before, and if so, can anyone point me to the thread?
    I have been searching around for papers by other researchers besides R. G Bednarik (not that I discount him , just to flesh out the argument) that investigate the migration of humans in the Pleistocene, specifically through SE Asia and Australasia.
    I came across this article by Sandra Bowdler at Uni of West Australia. This is the part that interests me the most:

    During the Pleistocene, as we have seen, there were times of lowered sea level, and hence of expanded land masses. To get to Australasia however there were always water barriers to be crossed. To reach Vietnam, Thailand, peninsular Malaysia and indeed Java, Palawan and Borneo did not require water crossings at times of low sea level. To reach Sulawesi did however necessitate watercraft, with a crossing of perhaps 50 km. To reach the expanded land mass of Australasia, several crossings were needed, of a maximum of 100 km. The new colonists did not however stop there. Archaeological evidence showed they went beyond the Australasian land mass, to the oceanic islands of New Ireland in eastern Papua New Guinea, by 33,000 years ago, and to Buka, the northernmost in the Solomon Islands chain, by 28,000 years ago.



    These feats of voyaging suggest many questions. What kind of watercraft were used, what routes were followed, were such voyages accidental or deliberate? To some extent, these arise from a continued disparaging and perhaps Eurocentric view of the capabilities of our forbears. In Europe, it is still a matter of debate whether pre-agricultural humans had the ability to voyage to Cyprus or Sardinia, Mediterranean islands requiring maximum water crossings of less than 50 km.



    We have no idea what kind of watercraft may have been used at this early time. No archaeological evidence, direct or indirect, exists to shed light on this question. The sea-going canoes of the Pacific, outriggers and dugouts, known from the historical period are of unknown antiquity. It is however usually assumed that they date from relatively recent times, consistent with the Austronesian expansion [see Spriggs, this volume?]. In Australia, it has usually been assumed that that expansion made little or no impact[6]. It might be thought therefore that Australian watercraft of the ethnographic present reflect a Pleistocene inheritance. We need to discount the dugouts of the north coast and the outriggers of the northeast, as these are thought to reflect the recent influences of Macassans and Papuans[7].



    We are thus left with a variety of bark canoes and log rafts which were made and used by Aboriginal people in different parts of Australia. They do not generally seem capable of long ocean voyages, and indeed there is some archaeological evidence to suggest they are none of them of any great antiquity. A survey of archaeological and ethnographic evidence shows that offshore islands visited by Aboriginal people by sea during the Holocene with such craft involved water crossings of no more than 25 km, with most crossings being less than 10km. Furthermore, the earliest dates for such crossings are, with perhaps two or three exceptions of 26 dated instances, only within the last 4000 years[8]. This suggests therefore that the maritime technology observed in recent times in Aboriginal Australia was not that used to colonise the Pacific originally.



    It has been suggested that the original voyages of Pacific discovery were accomplished with bamboo craft, perhaps rafts[9]. Since extensive stands of large bamboo probably did not occur indigenously in Australia, this could explain the lack of survival of this technology into recent times.


    Does anyone know of further research along this line, for instance experimental archaeology or modern voyages using replica or reconstructed craft?

    Thanks,
    Bric
     
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2008
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  3. OilIsMastery Banned Banned

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    Likewise.

    Great post.

    If desert iguanas can make a 7,000 mile 3 year journey to Fiji from Mexico 13 million years ago, 62 miles for humans should be no problem.
     
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  5. fantasus Registered Senior Member

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    Perhaps something like this could have happened several times in prehistoric times, as it have in the 2000s (Around Christmas 2004, Indian Ocean). : A Great Tsunami or storm hit coastal areas. Trees, rocks, plants are uprooted and some of it drive far to the sea, eventually to other coasts. Some trees carries living creatures, perhaps early man to those coasts.
    Of course therre can be objections, not least the improbability of several surving humans reaching the same shores, meeting settling and founding a new population. Still I think this scenario is far from impossible, since some tsunami survivors were found very far out on sea, as far as I can remember.
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The greatest impediment to the development of advanced technology by Mesolithic humans was the lack of permanent settlements. With no place to keep things--not to mention no draft animals or wheels--their posessions were limited to what they could carry on their long hunting and gathering circuits.

    The boundary between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic is generally defined as the invention of the technology of agriculture, but it is just as correct to define it as the invention of the technology of the village, since agriculture both required and made possible the building of permanent homesites.

    Looking at it that way, one sees a second scenario for the Neolithic Revolution: fishing villages. Some early settlements were clearly not populated by farmers, but by people who had discovered a dependable place to catch fish.

    This might have happened much earlier than the rough date of 9000BCE when the first cultivated plants appear in the archeological record. No one had to have a brainstorm, perform experiments, or observe a rare phenomenon to notice that the fishing was always good at one favorite location.

    Once people settled into a permanent location, then it became possible to plan and execute large projects with long schedules, such as the building of a seaworthy boat.

    According to the most recent research (see the "Out of Africa" thread for references), the original settlers of Australia were the first wave of migrants from Africa, during an ice age when Africa and Asia were plagued with drought and food was scarce. Sea level was much lower and they walked along the expanded and merged coastlines of the land masses, where they would have subsisted by fishing. Their campsites are lost beneath the now-higher seas, but it's not remarkable to suggest that they may have stopped and built villages occasionally at a choice fishing spot, with the spurt in technology that village life encourages. By the time they got to Oceania they may have been expert boat builders and made the trip to Australia easily--where, as an accident of climatology, the drought was less severe and the living was easier.

    According to the sources cited, life along the South Asian seacoast was not prohibitively difficult, and not all of the African refugees chose to continue the trek to Australia. There are still well-defined traces of Native Australian DNA in the coastal populations of the region, even after the second migration out of Africa ten thousand years later, from which all the rest of us are descended.
     
  8. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The seagoing craft of the northern peoples of the world - the kayaks and umiaks and various other less well known - were the products of temporary or migratory villages and camps among a hunting and fishing people.

    They were, at the time of first encounter with Western ships, very sophisticated and of a completely different technological heritage.

    These people - the Eskimo etc - had no basic technology or capability impossible, or even unlikely, for the early migrating humans of 40,000 years ago.

    People of similar capabilities and with a similar lifestyle could easily have built craft adequate for reaching Australia. That is not a stretch - that should be the default hypothesis.
     

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