TITLE:
The Beginnings of Maritime Travel
AUTHORS:
Robert G. Bednarik
KEYWORDS:
Maritime Navigation, Pleistocene, Indonesia, Mediterranean, America, Replicative Experimentation
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Anthropology,
Vol.4 No.4,
November
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: Navigation
of the sea is shown to have commenced in the order of one million years ago.
The earliest evidence for it appears to be that available from Nusa Tenggara,
Indonesia, but seafarers colonized also numerous other islands and one
continent during the Pleistocene. These early technological feats of hominins
provide a reliable measure of their technological limits, and indirectly about
their cognitive faculties as well. To explore these aspects, the First Mariners
Project conducts numerous experiments, some of which are briefly described in
this paper. The implications of its findings for the first colonization of the
Americas are also considered.