MANS WORLD ISSUE 2 'The Sea! The Sea!'

MAN'S WORLD
One of the mysterious Bradshaw
aboriginal paintings from Australia,
some of which may be 50,000 years old
STONE AGE SEAFARING
Words: Stone Age Herbalist (@paracelsus1092)
"Ships are the nearest things to dreams that hands have ever made, for somewhere
deep in their oaken hearts the soul of a song is laid." Robert N. Rose
One of the ultimate expressions of the heroic soul in
primitive man is that he stared across a violently
stormy body of water, and knowing all the dangers still
lashed trees and branches with rawhide and set out to
master his destiny. This is something of life at its most
vital, most energetic, most daring and ambitious. The
instinct to expand and explore. The world would be a
far smaller place if our ancestors had meekly accepted
their lot around the savannah watering holes.
So what do we actually know by way of real evidence of
the earliest seafaring? We are hobbled by the almost
total absence of organic preservation from the deepest
Palaeolithic. No wood, leather or hide artifacts remain.
This makes finding boats or sailing equipment virtually
impossible. Instead a fruitful approach has been to
combine the climatology data of which areas of land
would have been islands and infer from any human
remains that they must have sailed there. One of the
earliest pieces of evidence in this line comes from the
Kagayan Valley in northern Luzon, an island in the
Philippines. Remains of butchered megafauna and
stone tools have dated the arrival of Homo erectus, or
potentially even the Denisovans on the island to
709,000 years ago. This is an astonishingly archaic date
for a sea crossing. Could the simian figures of erectus
bands, even with language, have planned and executed
such a crossing? It goes against everything we
currently think we know about them. Yet the entire
continent of Oceania, with the Pacific to the east and
the Indian ocean to the west, is the stage for a hugely
complicated history of human migration. At various
points no less than five hominid species travelled and
flourished in the archipelagos and warm sheltered
coral bays.
Potentially as late as 15,000 BC Denisovans and
modern humans were breeding entirely new branches
of the family tree. The sea levels around South East Asia
were significantly lower than today, making it possible
to either walk to Borneo or into Taiwan and cross to
Luzon. But no matter how we look at it, the earliest
crossings involved a deliberate and organised mission
to traverse a body of water and colonise another land.
The fact that the earliest sea voyages were undertaken
by Homo erectus, rather than our own species has
irritated archaeologists and proved controversial, with
some saying that they were carried to Luzon on
tsunami debris! The evidence continues to build, with
stone tools found on the Arabian island of Socotra
dating to anywhere between 800,000 and one million
years ago, and more tools on the island of Crete, dated
to around 130,000 BP. These dates don’t fit anything
other than erectus or perhaps in the case of Crete,
Neanderthals. In the background of these arguments is
the spectre of the ridiculed ‘aquatic ape hypothesis’,
the idea that humans evolved under pressure to
become fishers and seashore foragers with unique
adaptations for the water. While the academy is
fiercely hostile to the idea, the evidence in favour keeps
mounting. Humans have the unusual ability to
voluntarily control our breathing, making it possible to
dive to great depths, and with training to stay
underwater for over ten minutes. We require iodine in
our diets and can process high levels of omega-3 fatty
acids. Our bodies are streamlined enough to swim, dive
and wade with a minimum of instruction and we are
born with a fatty vernix layer which is chemically
similar to other sea mammals. Added to this, all
human infants possess an innate diving reflex for
several
Issue 2 - The Sea! The Sea!