Ancient Craft, Epic Journey: Scientists Brave 140 Miles Across the Ocean in a Prehistoric Canoe—What They Discovered Changes History!
Building The Rudimentary Stone Age Canoe
The study and the coinciding canoe voyage are the culmination of years of theorizing and studying prehistoric human migration and travel. “Before our project, no one had seriously considered how this maritime migration occurred,” lead author and University of Tokyo anthropologist Yousuke Kaifu told Scientific American.
Kaifu and his team had previously attempted the journey using rafts, but they proved to be slow, unstable, and too difficult to control in the strong ocean currents of the East China Sea.
Yousuke KaifuResearchers used only tools and methods that would have been available to prehistoric humans to build the canoe.
So, the researchers decided to try again using a dugout canoe. To make the challenge more authentic, they built the vessel the same way as the prehistoric humans who would have originally used them to cross the sea. The scientists used stone axes with wooden handles to chop down a Japanese cedar tree and then carved it into a 25-foot-long canoe they dubbed Sugime.
Then, they launched the canoe from the eastern shore of Taiwan and set their sights on Japan’s Ryukyu Islands.
If this journey was to successfully recreate migrations made tens of thousands of years ago, researchers would need to limit their use of modern technology along the way. So, five experienced paddlers embarked on the multi-day voyage using only the Sun, stars, and ocean swells to guide their way.
“We found that the Paleolithic people could cross the sea with the strong ocean current if they had dugout canoes and were skillful, experienced paddlers and navigators,” Kaifu explained to Reuters. “They had to face the risk of being drifted by the strong ocean current and the possibility that they would never be able to come back to their homeland.”
Post Comment