Ahoy mateys! Some early hominids were seafarers, according to recent research. The evidence? Sizable caches of double-sided human hand axes dating back 130,000 years, found in nine separate sites in southwestern Crete.
Crete is an island (of course)--and has been for 5 million years. To get there, hominids must have sailed!
Researchers believe it unlikely that early hominids ended up on Crete by accident, on a raft blown out to sea. The sheer number of hand axes suggests a large population. (And, they were made of local Crete quartz, so there's no way one group could have carried a bunch over in one boat.)
So, either there were a hell of a lot of inbred hominids running around...or, several groups sailed to Crete purposefully.
At the time when homo erectus, homo heidelbergensis, and possibly early neanderthals were kicking around, who knows which was the first Christopher Columbus? Homo erectus had spread from Africa to Europe and Asia by this time, so he is the most likely candidate.
To think--a homo erectus would risk his life to explore new lands, maybe for food or just for safety. (No scientist has yet suggested a reason why they would have purposefully sailed to Crete.)It's a groundbreaking thought, in my mind, that homo erectus could have been so imaginative and such a risk-taker.
http://layscience.net/trackback/929
For those interested, this is actually pretty consistent with the known/reconstructed archeological record of the Indigenous Australians ("Aborigines"), that dates the arrival of the first people in Australia at about 40k - 70k BCE. To accomplish this, they must have crossed about 90 km (about 56 miles) of open sea. The most fascinating aspect of this isn't this feat itself, but that afterwards, they apparently abandoned any and all attempts to seafaring - Indigenous Australians are not known to have built anything approaching seaworthy crafts for millennia.
History only repeats itself if one doesn't listen the first time.
It seem like, to me, sailing as much as 56 miles takes a good deal of creativity and cooperation-- qualities of the brain that i didn't think fully developed until later humans.