Homo Erectus liked mucking around in boats....
Offline Hand axes excavated on Crete suggest hominids made sea crossings to go 'out of Africa' By Bruce Bower
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers. Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species — perhaps Homo erectus — had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologist Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island.
Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier, Strasser reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Archaeology. Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, he says. H. erectus had spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe by at least that time.
Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories hold that early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time.
“We’re just going to have to accept that, as soon as hominids left Africa, they were long-distance seafarers and rapidly spread all over the place,” Strasser says. The traditional view has been that hominids (specifically, H. erectus) left Africa via land routes that ran from the Middle East to Europe and Asia. Other researchers have controversially suggested that H. erectus navigated rafts across short stretches of sea in Indonesia around 800,000 years ago and that Neandertals crossed the Strait of Gibraltar perhaps 60,000 years ago.
Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or, in a Stone Age Gilligan’s Island scenario, accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea, remarks archaeologist Robert Tykot of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Only in the past decade have researchers established that people reached Crete before 6,000 years ago, Tykot says.
Strasser’s team cannot yet say precisely when or for what reason hominids traveled to Crete. Large sets of hand axes found on the island suggest a fairly substantial population size, downplaying the possibility of a Gilligan Island’s scenario, in Strasser’s view.
In excavations conducted near Crete’s southwestern coast during 2008 and 2009, Strasser’s team unearthed hand axes at caves and rock shelters. Most of these sites were situated in an area called Preveli Gorge, where a river has gouged through many layers of rocky sediment.
At Preveli Gorge, Stone Age artifacts were excavated from four terraces along a rocky outcrop that overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. Tectonic activity has pushed older sediment above younger sediment on Crete, so 130,000-year-old artifacts emerged from the uppermost terrace. Other terraces received age estimates of 110,000 years, 80,000 years and 45,000 years.
These minimum age estimates relied on comparisons of artifact-bearing sediment to sediment from sea cores with known ages. Geologists are now assessing whether absolute dating techniques can be applied to Crete’s Stone Age sites, Strasser says.
Intriguingly, he notes, hand axes found on Crete were made from local quartz but display a style typical of ancient African artifacts.
“Hominids adapted to whatever material was available on the island for tool making,” Strasser proposes. “There could be tools made from different types of stone in other parts of Crete.”
Strasser has conducted excavations on Crete for the past 20 years. He had been searching for relatively small implements that would have been made from chunks of chert no more than 11,000 years ago. But a current team member, archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University, pointed out that Stone Age folk would likely have favored quartz for their larger implements. “Once we started looking for quartz tools, everything changed,” Strasser says.
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/53219/title/Ancient_hominids_may_have_been_seafarers
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
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I don't know enough to comment intelligently. I read some in archeology/anthropology/paleontology -- I have read Journey of Man and Guns, Germs and Steel. Hm - as I remember, Spencer Wells was saying that they were not just sure exactly when people got to southern Europe from Africa/Middle East when he wrote Journey. But he postulated that it was probably multiple crossings and migrations.
Makes sense, I suppose. My brother-in-law is an ornithologist (specializing in owls mostly) and says migrating birds do not "go north" and then "go south". Instead, many of them meander north then south, south then north, back and forth, flying a little further each time as appropriate to the season. Why not people, too?
People are sometimes surprised by artifacts in far different places greatly resembling each other - I am thinking of pottery found in eastern South America and similar designs found in west Africa. (Thor Heyerdahl, natch) But I don't know why people can't have traveled that much. For example, we know people went from Tahiti to Hawaii and back - 2724 miles - in open outrigger canoes. (some photos of beautiful outrigger replicas here http://www.francispimmel.com/gallery2/) Africa to Crete? Just a gentle jaunt.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
for sure. No reason why there should not have been a polynesian style colonisation of the med though the polynesians are superb sailors and navigators and p'raps homo erectus was using your basic raft or animal hide coracle. I think it goes without saying that if erectus was clever enough not to be eaten by everything out to get him/her, the idea of floating on a buoyant object would not have been the quantum leap moderns suppose. Kids seem to be predisposed to playing with logs, rafts and all that. Same as kids experiment with fire and playing nursie. Guess it all ties in to fundamentals of survival somehow.
It occured to me after I made the original post but I thought to myself - what's the earliest evidence of religion? Probably Australian Aborigines - 40,000 or more years ago. But you'd assume religion is far older than that. Far older. And I wondered if homo erectus had some form of religion. It would be interesting to think so.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Depends on how you think of religion, I suppose. I always heard the anthropologists thought magic came first - with shamans and such. Then, some clever person came up with religion. With magic, people expect results - "rain dance, but no rain. time for a new shaman." But with religion, you can do a song and dance about "it is as the gods will" and no one expects you to always be able to influence the gods. And you would get it right often enough by sheer chance to be able to exaggerate the positive hits and down play the negative misses. "last year, when I prayed, the gods answered and sent rain." Never mentioning, of course, that the gods totally ignored all prayers this year. <shrug> People never change.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.