Early Seafarers Ruled the Oceans With Sophisticated Boats 40,000 Years Ago, Study Suggests

The ancestors of the Polynesians settled the remote islands of the Pacific between 1100 and 900 BCE, and have long been considered among the world’s earliest seafarers. However, new research suggests that people in Southeast Asia were mastering the deep seas tens of thousands of years earlier. Riczar Fuentes and Alfred Pawlik, researchers at Ateneo de Manila University’s department of sociology and anthropology, suggest that prehistoric Southeast Asians built sophisticated boats to fish in and travel across deep ocean waters as far back as 40,000 years ago. Their work is detailed in a study published February 8 in the Journal of Archaeological Science. “While the presence of fossils and artefacts provide ample evidence that early modern humans were able to cross the open sea, the very circumstances of why and how they moved into and across Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), and particularly the Wallacean region, remain to be addressed,” Fuentes and Pawlik wrote in the study. The issue wi ... Read full article.