Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon.

ABSTRACT: How Palaeolithic maritime transportation originated and developed is one of the key questions to understand the world-wide dispersal of modern humans that began 70,000-50,000 years ago. However, although the earliest evidence of maritime migration to Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) has been intensively studied, succeeding development of Paleolithic maritime activity is poorly understood. Here, we show evidence of deliberate crossing of challenging ocean that occurred 35,000-30,000 years ago in another region of the western Pacific, the Ryukyu Islands of southwestern Japan. Our analysis of satellite-tracked buoys drifting in the actual ocean demonstrated that accidental drift does not explain maritime migration to this 1200 km-long chain of islands, where the local ocean flows have kept th

SUBMITTER: Kaifu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7714783 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature