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 26, 16:10 -0400
From: Trevor Kenchington
Date: 2004 Nov 26, 16:10 -0400
Jared, You raise one of the obvious objections, which has also been raised by professional archaeologists who don't like to contemplate the idea that Homo erectus was capable of conceiving a sea-going boat. The other obvious objection is that the evidence for a human presence on Lombok around 600,000 may have been misinterpreted from some combination of natural features and anthropogenic ones from much later. I haven't seen a serious arguments of the pros and cons on the latter point. The counter to your argument, among professionals (which I am not), seems to be that the scale of the site on Lombok and the low probability that the one and only site there just happens to have been found make it unlikely that accidental drift across the Strait can explain what has been found. Whether that conclusion will hold up to further investigation or not, only time will tell. The Lombok Strait isn't wide by our standards. (I would happily attempt it in my own 22-footer, operating under sail and oar alone.) But it isn't exactly an easy bit of water, with strong currents sweeping south -- feeding water from the Pacific Equatorial Current system into the Indian Ocean. For half the year, the wind blows in the same direction, which certainly doesn't help. Whether there is any time of year when a log would drift from Bali to Lombok (rather than from Bali into the Arafura Sea), I have no idea. There has been a recent attempt to build a vessel that could have been constructed using Palaeolithic tools. The archaeologist who published the work, a guy called Bednarik or something like that, saw the result as a vessel of circa 600,000, suitable for reaching Lombok, but at least one of his associates has told me that the boat was really intended as one of circa 60,000 which could have been used in the settlement of Australia. The paper is in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology but I'd have to search for volume and page numbers. Trevor Kenchington You wrote: > I don't see why a crossing of 20+ miles should amaze anyone, even in > 600KBC. Someone gets washed out to sea by a flood, grabs a log, floats in > terror for 36 hours and swims ashore. If one of the opposite sex has the > same adventure within the decade...there's a colony. -- 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