The Beginnings of Maritime Travel

Abstract

Navigation of the sea is shown to have commenced in the order of one million years ago. The earliest evidence for it appears to be that available from Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, but seafarers colonized also numerous other islands and one continent during the Pleistocene. These early technological feats of hominins provide a reliable measure of their technological limits, and indirectly about their cognitive faculties as well. To explore these aspects, the First Mariners Project conducts numerous experiments, some of which are briefly described in this paper. The implications of its findings for the first colonization of the Americas are also considered.