All,
Please, find below, a complementary item, from Science News, on Homo erectus maritimus.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
Science News Online
Week of Oct. 18, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 16
Erectus Ahoy
Bruce Bower
As the sun edged above the horizon on Jan. 31, 2000, a dozen men boarded a bamboo raft off the east coast of the Indonesian island of Bali. Each gripped a wooden paddle and, in unison, deftly stroked the nearly 40-foot-long craft into the open sea. Their destination: the Stone Age, by way of a roughly 18-mile crossing to the neighboring island of Lombok. Project director Robert G. Bednarik, one of the assembled paddlers, knew that a challenging trip lay ahead, even discounting any time travel. Local fishing crews had told him of the Lombok Strait's fiendishly shifting currents, vicious whirlpools, and unexpected waves far from shore. No matter—Bednarik knew of no other way to demonstrate that Homo erectus, humanity's evolutionary precursor and perhaps a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, was the world's first seafarer.
Such a possibility falls far outside mainstream ideas about the origins of sea travel. Many researchers theorize that Southeast Asian H. sapiens built and navigated the first sea vessels between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, ultimately piloting them to the open spaces of Australia. However, archaeologists have found precious few remains of prehistoric rafts and boats. The oldest such finds, including wooden canoes and paddles, come from northern Europe and date to at most 9,000 years ago.
Nonetheless, Bednarik says, it's apparent that H. erectus—which may have survived in Java until 30,000 years ago—launched the first age of ocean journeys between 900,000 and 800,000 years ago.
The full article can be read
HERE.
