Tracking Stone Age mariners: projecting into the past

Abstract

ABSTRACT It has become increasingly clear that, through the millennia, travel by water has been generally safer, faster, and more economical than travel by land. Humans possessed seagoing watercraft early on, disablings and uncontrolled storm-generated drifts would inevitably have occurred, and the prevailing winds and oceanic surface currents would have impelled some of these craft over oceans, leading to insular and extrahemispheric discoveries and exchanges. Intentional exploratory voyages also occurred. Although there is much material evidence of developed watercraft from the Late Neolithic on, few Stone Age vessel vestiges other than of logboats have been recovered archaeologically. However, indirect means exist to obtain a sense of what occurred long ago. First is demonstration of very early human presences on islands. Here, many contemporary scientific proxies for otherwise-undocumented human occupancy are described. In the New World, the presence of tropical/subtropical human intestinal parasites implies trans-ocean crossings impressively early in time, including by the seventh millennium B.C.