Cavemen of the sea

By Jim and Allen Richardson

Zenith City Weekly

Consider the paradigm-busting implication of recent finds on the Greek Island of Crete ("Primitive Humans Conquered Sea, Surprising Finds Suggest," NationalGeographic.com, February 17, 2010).

Basically, archaeologists have discovered caveman tools on an island in the deep blue sea, which presents a fatal problem for the mainstream view that cavemen couldn't even conceive of a boat.

As National Geographic daintily explains, "Many researchers have hypothesized that the early humans of this time period were not capable of devising boats or navigating across open water."

That's why this find is characterized as surprising-scientists' heads are exploding through the halls of academia: Cavemen...in boats? But everyone knows there's no caves on the sea!

(To be clear, when we colloquially and cheekily write "cavemen," we are generally referring to those extinct lineages of humanity such as Homo erectus and so on.)

Scientists had gone to Crete, hoping to find human artifacts from 11,000 years ago, and wound up finding stone caveman tools no younger than 175,000 years old.

Needless to say, this "suggests that people besides technologically modern humans-possibly Homo heidelbergensis-island-hopped across the Mediterranean tens of thousands of millennia earlier than expected."

On the evolutionary timeline, Homo heidelbergensis pre-date Neanderthals by hundreds of thousands of years. Neanderthals came much later and may have backslid somewhat in tech level, as there appears to be little evidence of them using boats.

However, the similarly ancient Homo erectus has been tied to boat use since a 1998 article in Nature about tools found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

(The subsequent discovery of so-called "Hobbit" bones on Flores necessitated speculation that Homo erectus then underwent the process of insular dwarfism peculiar to islands.)

So even though it really shouldn't be surprising, everybody's still surprised by this latest find. "I was flabbergasted," said Boston University archaeologist and stone-tool expert Curtis Runnels.

"The idea of finding tools from this very early time period on Crete was about as believable as finding an iPod in King Tut's tomb."

But the only people who are surprised haven't been paying attention to a long series of archeological anomalies over the years.

Now that it's well established cavemen could navigate the open water in boats, we hope many previously dismissed finds can get reappraised.

In particular, we think of the possibly 300,000-year-old pre-Neanderthal site in Brazil's Serra Negra Mountains in the Grotto of Hope. That find was dismissed because it flew in the face of the dominant paradigm that cavemen never made it to the New World.

More to the point, they couldn't have because they were bloody cavemen by definition and too stupid to think of boats.

Well, now we know different. Did Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis make it to the New World? On an Atlantic or a Pacific route? These possibilities need to be seriously investigated from here on out.

Archaeology needs to disown those in its ranks who dismiss finds for being "too old," as there are now tens of thousands of millennia of seafaring unaccounted for.

It seems science and the scientific press take pains not to mention (or even think of) very obvious possibilities that are simply too earth shattering to acknowledge.

Like this bit in National Geographic: "If ancient humans were crossing the Mediterranean, Runnels said, then they certainly could have crossed other water barriers, such as the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden."

Yes, hmm...and isn't there another archaeologically significant water barrier? Oh, yes, the Atlantic Ocean.

It's not rocket science, people. Fucking Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Atlantic in 1947 on a boat about as sophisticated as a hay bale.

Or this bit: "[T]he assumptions that we have had-that the peopling of Eurasia was done by early [cavemen] moving overland through the Near East, into India and down-will have to be revisited."

Understatement of the year. Everything will have to be revisited. Hang on to your hats, kids, because it looks like the sea was filled with cavemen in boats.

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