NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Navigational reinvention
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Nov 25, 18:58 -0400
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Nov 25, 18:58 -0400
Peter, Thank you for your posting -- some of which I was familiar with and some not. By way of clarification: You wrote: > As Trevor has pointed out, during one of the ice age periods, with the > coastline much lower, the gap between Asia and Australia was lessened. > Trevor says it was 20+ miles, another figure I have come across is 65 > miles as the minimal barrier of water. My "20+ miles" referred to the Lombok Strait, apparently crossed by 600,000. There are other and wider gaps between Lombok and Australia. I think the shortest crossing, at Ice-Age sea levels, did not take migrants east to Papua and the south but rather south from Timor to what is now Australia's North West Shelf but was then a wide lowland. That would have been about a 65-mile crossing. There is a shallow area near the outer edge of the North West Shelf (called the "Cootamundra Shoals" perhaps?) which, being within SCUBA-divable depths, drew an archaeological investigation in the late 1980s or thereabouts. They didn't find any evidence of a human presence but that doesn't mean that some Palaeolithic hunter didn't walk the area long before. Also: > If we look elsewhere during prehistoric times, the use of wheeled carts > drawn by cattle was common across Asia, India and Europe over many tens > of thousands of years ? miniature models of them are not rare in Russian > museums (I?ve seen ?em!) excavated from a variety of sites. In these the > ancestors of many of today?s Europeans are thought to have migrated from > Asia, after the glaciers retreated. Boatbuilding skills are a natural > progression from wagon building skills, once people settle along a coast. Wagon-building can only follow domestication of draught animals, presumably first turning the aurochs into the ox, then later the horse into an animal large enough to handle chariots. That must confine wagons to, what, the past 20,000 years? Sea-going boats extend back at least twice as far and maybe 30 times further. Simple boats for sheltered waters must have been developed considerably earlier still. Or do we postulate that cattle were domesticated much earlier than can be confirmed from the archaeological record? I'd suggest that wagon-building skills in many cultures were a natural progression from boat-building. My father was an architect and used to like to joke that he was member of the world's second-oldest profession. I, however, am not convinced that humans started building houses before they started building water craft and navigating them. Which perhaps shouldn't be too surprising: Biologically, we are land animals and we can exploit the resources of the land without needing more technology than hand tools. The plentiful resources of the sea, however, are essentially out of reach unless we have access to some sort of boat. (Consider how difficult it is to get yourself and a basic tool kit out to a boat on her mooring if you have to swim, compared to how easy it is to achieve the same thing given even the simplest of boats -- whether a child's inflatable or the bark bundle-raft which served much the same purpose before modern plastics). There was a strong ecological imperative driving our ancestors to develop boats. Mariners and navigators, even amateurs as most of us are on this list, can rightly be proud of carrying on a _very_ long human tradition. Trevor Kenchington -- Trevor J. Kenchington PhD Gadus@iStar.ca Gadus Associates, Office(902) 889-9250 R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour, Fax (902) 889-9251 Nova Scotia B0J 2L0, CANADA Home (902) 889-3555 Science Serving the Fisheries http://home.istar.ca/~gadus