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Neanderthals were Ancient Mariners

Well this little piece of news deserves to be making more waves (no pun intended): Neanderthals were ancient mariners, crossing the Mediterranean in boats 100,000 years ago:

Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive “Mousterian” stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren’t islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow.

Now, George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece says we can rule out the former. The islands, he says, have been cut off from the mainland for as long as the tools have been on them.

Ferentinos compiled data that showed sea levels were 120 metres lower 100,000 years ago, because water was locked up in Earth’s larger ice caps. But the seabed off Greece today drops down to around 300 metres, meaning that when Neanderthals were in the region, the sea would have been at least 180 metres deep (Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.032).

Ferentinos thinks Neanderthals had a seafaring culture for tens of thousands of years. Modern humans are thought to have taken to the seas just 50,000 years ago, on crossing to Australia.

The journeys to the Greek islands from the mainland were quite short – 5 to 12 kilometres – but according to Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island, the Neanderthals didn’t stop there. In 2008 he found similar stone tools on Crete, which he says are at least 130,000 years old. Crete has been an island for some 5 million years and is 40 kilometres from its closest neighbour – suggesting far more ambitious journeys.

Strasser agrees Neanderthals were seafaring long before modern humans, in the Mediterranean at least. He thinks early hominins made much more use of the sea than anyone suspects, and may have used the seas as a highway, rather than seeing them as a barrier. But the details remain lost in history.

Editor
  1. Coastal populations
    It makes you wonder what was lost when sea levels rose at the end of the last Ice Age. Graham Hancock is convinced evidence of an ancient seafaring civilisation with coastal cities was submerged at this time. I’m not suggesting Neanderthals built Atlantis and mapped Antarctica, but it’s clear they were more socially & technologically developed than we had previously thought. Perhaps they lived predominantly along coastlines, and as the sea levels rose they retreated inland, which contributed to their demise. Alas, we may never know the full extent of Neanderthal ‘civilisation’, as their story was lost beneath the seas in prehistory.

  2. Late in the game
    Some anthropologists are convinced that Homo Erectus had also a fondness for crossing the seas.

    But America was reached by crossing the Bering strait, right? Right? 😉

    Well, tell that to the Hopi, who might very well be the oldest surviving culture in the continent, and have a tradition of crossing the oceans with boats after the latest cataclysm that destroyed mankind… for the 3th time, that is.

    1. Intuitive
      It does make me wonder whether many of us are still plagued with a post Christian literalism in our intuitive gut. I’m used to thinking of planetary processes in terms of millions, or hundreds of millions of years, but when I think that Neanderthals might have been boating around the world 130,000 years ago for some bizarre reason it seems amazing to me. It’s silly really – just an error in my intuition.

      Its alight having a picture built up on what has been found and hoping that more and more research and expeditions increases the accuracy, but life on Earth is very old and sometimes I suspect that many of us are still a little too affected by the last 2000 years of assumptions. I have to slap myself and remind myself of the difference between being surprised by new evidence and being surprised by possibility.

      1. Hell man I know some
        Hell man I know some neanderthals who are pretty good at sailing, chasing women, and drinking barrels of beer. They can and often do wind up in all sorts of places far and wide. Casting up on shore somewhere is what they do best.
        We have to imagine too that among the neanderthals there was probably the occasional genius whose intellect was on a par with that of Cro-Magnon. It just takes a visionary to carry a tribe along to new heights and places. People (and that would neanderthals) are mostly followers.

        1. Neanderthals

          Hell man I know some neanderthals who are pretty good at sailing, chasing women, and drinking barrels of beer. They can and often do wind up in all sorts of places far and wide. Casting up on shore somewhere is what they do best.

          They don’t fare well in airplanes, I’ve heard 😉

          Srsly though, we are still showing the paradigm of pairing Neanderthals = Brutes. Why? Because they are not around here anymore to defend themselves. If they died out, it’s because they were stupid, right?

          But we aren’t exactly ‘on the clear yet’ if you know what I mean. Maybe it’s true that several great civilizations have been destroyed in the past, and if 100 millenia from now someone gets to find out how we used to poison ourselves with junk food and spend most of our lives in front of a screen, they might get to add 2+2 on account of why WE failed.

          1. Junk Food & Flat Screens
            —————————————————–
            …….we used to poison ourselves with junk food and spend most of our lives in front of a screen,…….
            —————————————————–

            You say that like it’s a bad thing……. 😉

          2. LOL

            You say that like it’s a bad thing……. 😉

            That’s why I don’t like to be taken photographs. Because 10,000 years from now when kid robots are being taught the reasons why H. Sapiens went extinct, I don’t want MY face pasted on their textbooks 😉

    2. Neandertals, et al…….

      Concur.

      It’s interesting to note the story I read a couple years ago about scientists running DNA tests on American Indians. There were 5 sets of DNA “types” identified, 4 of which were “Asian” in origin, and 1 of which was European. Go figure, eh?

      I’ve argued for 3 decades now with all sorts of folks that crossing the Atlantic would be, in some ways, easier than the Pacific, even prior to the Ice Age. Heck, if the Vikings could do it in their shallow-draft, open-topped clinker-built vessels, then a whole lot of possibilities are opened up.

      Then you get European-styled points being dug up and dated to thousands of years earlier than Clovis items, and not just along the Eastern coast of these United States, but into Texas as well, and the evidence just can’t be ignored any further.

      Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As the article rightly points out, so much of what we should be able to find will be miles offshore, and rather deep, most likely requiring submersibles to properly excavate and process.

      It will be done, eventually, because the evidence will demand it be done. Until then, we’ll still have to suffer the pushback from educators of several branches of science who have their careers and reputations dependent upon the “out of Asia” migration theories.

      1. Sotuknang

        Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As the article rightly points out, so much of what we should be able to find will be miles offshore, and rather deep, most likely requiring submersibles to properly excavate and process.

        “I have washed away even the footprints of your Emergence; the stepping-stones which I left for you. Down on the bottom of the seas lie all the proud cities, the flying patuwvotas [flying shields], and the worldly treasures corrupted with evil, and those people who found no time to sing the praises to the Creator from the tops of their hills. But the day will come, if you preserve the memory and the meaning of your Emergence, when these stepping-stones will emerge again to prove the truth you speak.”

        ~Words of Sotuknang (the creator god) to the Hopi people, after the destruction of the 3rd world

  3. Canoeing Neanderthals.
    Seems a natural progression. Started for food gathering. Then “accidental adventures”. But its when we get to the type of water craft they built. Sails, very doubtful. But oared vessels, I can imagine that.

    1. Why not sails?
      Why not sails? Neanderthals do not appear to have been stupid, in fact quite the contrary. It’s a lot easier to sit and hold the end of a rope and let the wind do the work than it is to keep dipping paddles into the water! I vote for sails.

      Regards, Kathrinn

  4. from the Mu-for-You-Dept.
    it only stands to reason :3

    after all, this noble & wicked race had to be kept in check (what else can we say aboot a race that did the bluewater classic in 18 hours?). no wonder they had to create the cro-mags so that the noble ape could have a little more time with their discoveries.

    though neanderthals (known by their race name of “Cool”) can still be found, mainly in death metal bands and transgender activism :3

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