Neolithic boats found in the Mediterranean reveal advanced nautical technology

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-neolithic-boats-excavated-mediterranean-reveal.html

by WaitWaitWha • 2 years ago

99 40 2 years ago

borissk• 2 years ago

People went to Australia and many remote islands in the oceans thousands of years ago. Probably had as good boats as the guys in the Mediterranean.

jmclnx• 2 years ago

Depends upon when :) I thought most migration to Australia was when they were land bridges due to the sea level.

But off hand I do not remember when the Polynesian started their migrations, was it 3,000 years ago ? Their boats and navigation were quite remarkable back then.

Anyway, makes sense that the Mediterranean area had good boat tech at such an early time. It is a kind of "closed" area and you throw a boat in it, it will run into some land after a rather brief time. So people with faster and reliable water transport would do better than people without.

I would not be surprised if they find some good boat tech much much earlier.

AlotOfReading4• 2 years ago

Australasia has not been connected to anywhere else by land for about 50 million years. The land bridges you're remembering are within australasia, particularly new guinea <-> Australia <-> Tasmania.

freedomben6• 2 years ago

Yes, they had decent boats that had outriggers on them made of lashed logs to steady for ocean travel. They did not have to go super far, and their boats and nautical skills were quite primitive by today's standards, but they were able to get to and populate the Polynesian Islands.

euroderf• 2 years ago

The first chapter of James Michener's "Hawaii" is a nice description of what exploring the Pacific in a huge catamaran might have been like.

FWIW Taiwan seems to have been the cradle of Pacific seafaring culture.

wolverine876• 2 years ago

Here's the paper, which might be a better link:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

freedomben6• 2 years ago

If you find this interesting, or just generally want a remarkable overview of human history, I highly recommend the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared diamond. It won a Pulitzer prize in its day, and really is a terrific book. Little dated, having been written in the late '90s, but the vast majority of it is still up to date and very interesting. The author does repeat a few fad claims from the '90s that have been debunked (such as the QWERTY keyboard being intentionally slow), but nothing really substantial.

makeitdouble• 2 years ago

A friendly note to anyone going into it with no other info: Guns, Germs, and Steel reached the status of having its own wikipedia entry [0] and is very widely known, with enough controversy to fuel endless debates on historical subreddits. Enjoy your read and be prepared when you'll want to share your thoughts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel

kuhewa• 2 years ago

Co-signed, worth reading but please don't quote the book at cocktail parties unless it is a claim you have independently (of the book) investigated

freedomben6• 2 years ago

Yes absolutely, and thank you!

Even as a lay reader (though I have read many other books and The Great Courses on similar material) there were several things I picked up on that are not scholarly at all. The most visible of which is the weird obsession the author has with repeatedly making sure that the reader knows that Europeans are not smarter than anybody else (though explicitly are less smart than Polynesians, an ironic contradiction to the author's own contention just a couple sentences prior that there are no intelligent differences among humans) and that any consideration whatsoever that different societies might have been different and made different choices with different outcomes, is utterly racist and unacceptable. It definitely struck me as very anti-science.

But taken as a whole I enjoyed much about the book's approach and there are plenty of great things in there. And I would say about any book, definitely don't take anything as gospel. Always, always, read the criticisms and other discussions before just accepting things as "correct" simply because they were printed in a book.

willmadden• 2 years ago

You should also read the criticisms of that book, of which there are many. It's a good read, but much of it is speculation backed up by unprovable theories and the occasional factual error.

astrange• 2 years ago

Then you can read the countercriticism.

https://blog.daviskedrosky.com/p/jared-diamond-a-reply-to-hi...

freedomben6• 2 years ago

Yes please, I would love to read the criticisms of the book. Do you have any specific recommendations? Another commenter mentioned the Wikipedia page, which I am looking at now.

I definitely have criticisms of my own, such as the author being obsessed with telling the reader directly that Europeans aren't smarter (in fact he makes clear multiple times that Polynesians are genetically smarter than Europeans), and with him calling everyone and everything racist if they even consider the possibility that differences between groups of humans could have had anything to do with how their histories turned out, even directly calling any of those theories "racist." He also freely mixes his own opinion with facts, although he did usually make an attempt to include some of the counter-arguments, though they smelled a bit like strawmen.

But overall the book's attempt at comprehensive, engaging overview and the focus around what seems like such a simple question ("Yali's question"), and a lot of mostly accurate stuff, made for an enjoyable read and one I would recommend.

pg_1234• 2 years ago

The book is internally inconsistent, with the author cherry-picking "facts" to support his own prejudices. In some cases the same data is used for mutually exclusive conclusions in different chapters. Basically, he making up conclusions and then throwing any shit against the wall in the hope it sticks, with no regard for what he's already said in the same book.

It's pseudo-science, designed to let complacent readers validate their prejudices, and pat themselves on the back.

MostlyStable• 2 years ago

validate their prejudices

I have never understood this particular criticism of the work. It is, if anything, an extremely strident argument against prejudice. The entire point is that differences in current day development are not due to innate deficiencies in the people but rather at least in part due to historical quirks of geography and ecology and therefore current development level says very close to nothing about the intrinsic potential or capabilities of anyone from any region of the world.

namaria• 2 years ago

Earth Transformed by Frankopan is a nice recent addition to the genre of big history. I found it incredibly well sourced, and devoid of grand theoretical claims. It also doesn't suffer of Western centrism, the author goes to great lengths to show global developments and how big environmental changes impacted different regions and cultures in different ways. Just facts and very balanced analysis, and it is a huge book. It has 200 pages just of notes, that you download separately because the tome was already nearly 1000 pages long.

ZunarJ52• 2 years ago

Though a fun thought experiment, this book isn't up to date with modern knowledge and isn't taken seriously by archaeologists. It also doesn't hold much water when the theories proposed are empirically tested. Grand narratives are legacy science.

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-eurasia-dominant-east-west-axi...

https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic...

gradus_ad• 2 years ago

You were on the mark until the last sentence. Grand narratives are an indispensable part of science. When we discover the right narrative (evolution, the big bang, etc) it helps to frame all of our subsequent thinking. His arguments are bad, but their attachment to a grand narrative are irrelevant to their being bad.

anton-107• 2 years ago

"Sapiens" by Yuval Harari is really remarkable overview of human history and is much more recently written. I read it twice already and enjoyed it a lot both times.

Staple_Diet• 2 years ago

Thanks for reminding me to read this, been on the list for a while.

freedomben6• 2 years ago

Yes absolutely agree, sapiens was phenomenal. It wasn't nearly as comprehensive as guns, germs and steel, but absolutely would recommend it

p3rls• 2 years ago

I remember reading this as a boy and thinking what the fuck this dude is way too obsessed with these Polynesians. Something about geographical determinism really draws in the creeps.

bookofjoe• 2 years ago

An iconoclastic recent book: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250858801/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

contingencies• 2 years ago

If you like this sort of thing, track down the book The Sea-craft of Prehistory by Paul Johnstone. Unfortunately, not available on libgen but may be possible to borrow with an archive.org account or a good library. Published in the 1980s, it broadly summarizes global archaeological evidence to that date and breaks down the major boat-making techniques and their variants and limitations. A particularly well written, clearly illustrated and enjoyable book which I found to be extremely accessible and interesting. Expensive to buy though, used copies ~$120+

Boat building with adzes must have really sucked, but imagine the feeling to a prehistoric human taking their own boat on the open ocean for the first time, especially if they had a sail, invented around this time.

On that note, Wikipedia confidently states The invention of the sail was a technological advance of equal or even greater importance than the invention of the wheel, which incidentally is thought to have been invented roughly around the time of these boats.

Evidently, rock and sail > rock and roll.

The late neolithic - what a time to be alive!

Neolithic boats found in the Mediterranean reveal advanced nautical technology

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