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Thursday, December 29th, 2022

Our human ancestors learned to sail half a million years ago, study suggests

Author:     Troy Farah
Source:     Salon
Publication Date:     DECEMBER 28, 2022 2:16PM (EST)
 Link: Our human ancestors learned to sail half a million years ago, study suggests
Stephan:   When I was a young man taking an anthropology course as an Echols Scholar at the University of Virginia, early hominids were portrayed as brutish primitives not far evolved from say gorillas. In the years since all of that has been shown to be nonsense. We now know, for instance, that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals found each other attractive enough that they interbred, and that millions of people today have genes that trace back to their Neanderthal ancestors. We also know that our forebearer species had a sense of the continuity of consciousness, and spiritual traditions, and now we are learning that technological developments we thought specific to humans, like boats and navigation, existed long before Homo Sapiens even existed. Here is a fascinating report on that new research.
A boat approaching a small island in the Aegean Sea.  Credit: George Pachantouris / Getty

Imagine ancient hominids sailing the Mediterranean hundreds of thousands of years before humans (Homo sapiens) appeared. The idea might sound bizarre: we think of boats as a human transportation technology, something that, like the wheel, our primitive ancestors developed at the dawn of civilization. So the revelation that a precursor to humans — meaning, a species of closely-related hominids that predate us — may have invented the boat and even sailed the Mediterranean long before us is a shocking proposition. 

Yet that is exactly what new research suggests: hominids crossed the Mediterranean Sea much earlier than previously thought — before even Homo sapiens first appeared — which means these ancient humans must have learned how to sail nearly half a million years ago. The study prompts a shocking re-evaluation of an activity and a technology that seemed distinctly human. 

The first humans and our many hominid cousins like Neanderthals originated in Africa, but it wasn’t long before we wandered off to […]

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