The beginning of watercraft building and seafaring is shrouded in darkness, for which no direct archaeological evidence seems to have been preserved today. For the reconstruction of the ‘palaeo-boatbuilding and seafaring’ one has to appeal once more to indirect evidence, such as the existence of archaeological settlement traces in remote Melanesian and Polynesian archipelagos (see Oceania: New Guinea and Melanesia; Migrations: Pacific). The large Melanesian archipelagos were seemingly populated already by the time Greater Australia (Australia and New Guinea) was settled, therefore it seems reasonable to assume that movement of people over large stretches of water began about 60 000 years ago if not earlier. Thus, by the time of the legendary Greek conquest of Troy, the bearers of the Lapita culture reached Fiji and Western Polynesia. Their skilled navigation can only be assessed based on ethnographic information about catamaran sailing and on simulation results of computer modeling. By using their large paired dug-outs to increase stability, the Lapita people steered seemingly their vessels first into the prevailing easterlies only to afterward begin exploration and colonization of the new islands on the return leg. This original way of navigation was seemingly the safest on the vast stretches of water of the Pacific Ocean where dry land is so scarce.
The same ethnographic, archaeological, and anthropological data suggest also another path of maritime exploration and colonization, this time in the Arctic. In northern Europe, the appearance of the Comsa and Fosna-Hesnbacka cultures mark the beginning of a human habitat exclusively oriented toward a maritime economy where seal hunting constituted the main subsistence activity. Characteristic for these cultures, as the representations from Alta stones show, is the use of skinboats whose construction can be traced today in the classical umiak of the Greenland’s native people, and the fifteenth century find from Pearyland, Greenland. In spite of the absence of direct evidence about seafaring in this region, the linguistic closeness between the Inuit of Alaska, the Eskimo of North Canada, and the native Greenlanders and their Traditional way of living strongly suggests that these hunting people were in close contact throughout history and that they traveled by sea covering large distances in the Beaufort Sea, the Baffin Bay, and the Davis Strait. However, these regions were not the only ones that witnessed an apparent explosion in shipbuilding and seafaring. In the Gujarat province, near to the India-Pakistan modern border, remains of huge docks bear indirect witness to the seafaring abilities of the Harrapan cultural agents in the second half of the third millennium BC (see Asia, South: Indus Civilization). In the Mediterranean, the royal cargo of the Uluburun wreck is perhaps the best indication of the maritime trade connections in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Bronze Age was in fact the period which saw the first thalasocracies that created longdistance shipping lanes for rare raw materials (e. g., obsidian in the Neolithic times, tin in the Bronze Age) established, outlining the importance of seafaring and shipbuilding at this early date in the history of mankind.
World History
