Katherine Reece Wrote:
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> Allan Shumaker Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
>
> > Now I freely admit that this has no bearing
> on
> > preColumbian contact in the Americas, but it
> does
> > indicate that long range sea travel does date
> back
> > much farther than we thought just a few years
> ago.
>
>
> If you remember sometime back we had some boat
> discussions. The first evidence of deep water
> sailing that I could find was this from one of
> Erlandson's papers. "Kozushima Island, Japan:
> Upper Paleolithic peoples on Honshu crossing 50 km
> wide channel to obtain obsidian. 25-20 Kyr" eerrr
> that wasn't the name of the article, just the
> information from his table on early sailing.
>
> That would have been in deep, cold, water.
>
> Here's the thread for the previous discussions:
>
>
>
>
> Kat
>
> Ma'at Moderator
>
> Founder and Director of The Hall of Ma'at
> Amun: Co-Owner/Co-Moderator
> Contributing author to Archaeological Fantasies:
> How pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and
> misleads the public
> Kat's Personal Site
>
>
> "If you panic, you're lost" -- W. T. 'Watertight'
> Southard
>
>
>
> Edited 1 times. Last edit at 08/04/11 05:20PM by
> Katherine Reece.
I'll repeat a segment from Kirsch's review but - as Kirsch points out perhaps 60,000 years ago humans took
simple watercraft bamboo rafts, etc to cross Wallacea to get to new Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons. No big deal sailing. Kirsch also points out that ALL of these constitute a "Nonetheless, the Bismarcks to the Solomons comprise a chain of almost continuously intervisible island masses, which would have facilitated discovery of new islands and subsequent voyaging between them."
However, after that a gap of 380 km stopped them cold for ten thousand years, and further progress only took place when a completely different group of people, the Lapita, with a whole different more advanced technology arrived on the scene.
Bernard