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Discover Magazine. Science, Technology and The Future 
05.20.2008

Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?

Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.

by Heather Pringle

Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from
a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the
world's leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much
of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human
migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a
figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a
lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson
looks as pleased as the father of a newborn--and perhaps just as
anxious --as he shows me one of his latest prize finds.

The little "tree" in my hand is a dart head fashioned from
creamy-brown chert and bristling with tiny barbs designed to lodge in
the flesh of marine prey. Erlandson recently collected dozens of these
little stemmed points from San Miguel Island, a scrap of land 27 miles
off the coast of California. Radiocarbon dating of marine shells and
burned twigs at the site shows that humans first landed on San Miguel
at least 12,000 years ago, and the dart head in my hand holds clues to
the ancestry of those seafarers. Archaeologists have recovered similar
items scattered along the rim of the North Pacific, and some have even
been found in coastal Peru and Chile. The oldest appeared 15,600 years
ago in coastal Japan. To Erlandson, these miniature trees look like a
trail left by mariners who voyaged along the stormy northern coasts of
the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Americas during the last Ice Age.
"We haven't published the evidence for this hypothesis yet, and I'm
kind of nervous about it," he says. "But we are getting very close."

Until recently most researchers would have dismissed such talk of Ice
Age mariners and coastal migrations. Nobody, after all, has ever
unearthed an Ice Age boat or happened upon a single clear depiction of
an Ice Age dugout or canoe. Nor have archaeologists found many coastal
campsites dating back more than 15,000 years. So most scientists
believed that Homo sapiens evolved as terrestrial hunters and
gatherers and stubbornly remained so, trekking out of their African
homeland by foot and spreading around the world by now-vanished land
bridges. Only when the Ice Age ended 12,000 to 13,000 years ago and
mammoths and other large prey vanished, archaeologists theorized, did
humans systematically take up seashore living--eating shellfish,
devising fishing gear, and venturing offshore in small boats.

But that picture, Erlandson and others say, is badly flawed, due to
something researchers once rarely considered: the changes in sea level
over time. Some 20,000 years ago, for example, ice sheets locked up
much of the world's water, lowering the oceans and laying bare vast
coastal plains--attractive hunting grounds and harbors for maritime
people. Today these plains lie beneath almost 400 feet of water, out
of reach of all but a handful of underwater archaeologists. "So this
shines a spotlight on a huge area of ignorance: what people were doing
when sea level was lower than at present," says Geoff Bailey, a
coastal archaeologist at the University of York in England. "And that
is especially problematic, given that sea level was low for most of
prehistory."

Concerned that evidence of human settlement and migration may be lost
under the sea, researchers are finding new ways of tracking ancient
mariners. By combining archaeological studies on remote islands with
computer simulations of founding populations and detailed examinations
of seafloor topography and ancient sea level, they are amassing
crucial new data on voyages from northeast Asia to the Americas 15,000
years ago, from Japan to the remote island of Okinawa 30,000 years
ago, and from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago. New
evidence even raises the possibility that our modern human ancestors
may have journeyed by raft or simple boat out of Africa 60,000 to
70,000 years ago, crossing the mouth of the Red Sea. "If they could
travel from Southeast Asia to Australia 50,000 years ago, the question
now is, how much farther back in time could they have been doing it?"
Bailey asks. "Why not the Red Sea?"

Our new understanding of climate and sea-level change sheds light on
something that has long puzzled archaeologists: How did modern humans
colonize the far reaches of the globe so quickly after their exodus
from Africa? If Erlandson and his colleagues are right, it was a
series of sea voyages and river crossings that brought our ancestors
to alien lands, launching the greatest biological invasion of all
time.

ANCIENT ISLAND-HOPPERS
Erlandson never bought the long-held assumption among archaeologists
that our distant ancestors were the ultimate land lovers. He grew up
near the ocean, surfing and snorkeling as a boy in Southern California
and Hawaii and earning the nickname Shredded Coconut for his
sun-bleached hair. He could not fathom anyone's resisting the call of
the sea.

Erlandson began actively questioning the received wisdom while still
an undergraduate. After reading about simple reed boats that the
Chumash people once paddled along the California coast, he and a few
friends decided to make a replica. They dried tule reeds, lashed them
together in bundles, and coated them with tar to make a 17-foot-long
vessel capable of carrying three people plus cargo. Then they launched
it off the Santa Barbara coast. Paddling effortlessly from kelp forest
to kelp forest, Erlandson once voyaged 14 miles in an afternoon. "The
boat soaked up a lot of water, but it was unsinkable," he recalls. "So
it doesn't take that much ingenuity and complex technology to make a
pretty sound boat that can get you across a fairly substantial
strait."

By the 1980s, coastal archaeologists were beginning to mull over some
remarkably early finds in Australia. A series of excavations by Jim
Bowler, Alan Thorne, and others in the continental interior revealed
that ancient humans had fished and collected freshwater mussels along
the shores of the Willandra Lakes 50,000 years ago, possibly earlier.
How on earth had humans managed to arrive down under so early? Even
then Australia was an island continent, and some researchers reported
that its indigenous inhabitants, the Aborigines, historically lacked
oceangoing boats. It did not seem possible that their ancestors had
arrived by watercraft.

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