7,000-Year-Old Sunken Boats Reveal How Neolithic Seafarers Traversed The Mediterranean

There's a large part of human history hidden beneath the sea. From Canada's coastlines to the flat underwater fringes of Australia, sunken sites around the world have delivered troves of artifacts that give archaeologists a deeper understanding of where ancient humans lived and how they potentially traversed treacherous seas to reach new lands.

Stone Age farming communities in Europe depended on the seas to travel, trade and communicate, particularly as they spread around the Mediterranean during the Neolithic, between 10,000 and 7000 BC. But remnants of their technological prowess have been submerged in lakes and lagoons, or buried in soggy peat bogs – making them difficult to find.

Now, a team of researchers led by archeologist Juan Gibaja of the Spanish National Research Council has described a quintet of canoes dredged up from a Neolithic lakeshore village near Rome, Italy, that reveal the sophisticated boat-building techniques of seafaring communities in the region.

"Direct dating of Neolithic canoes from La Marmotta reveals them to be the oldest in the Mediterranean," the researchers said in a statement.

https://www.sciencealert.com/7000-year-old-sunken-boats-reveal-how-neolithic-seafarers-traversed-the-mediterranean

Good old peat, the archaeologist's friend.

Most of these boats seem to be dugout canoes. The oldest boat found in Britain, seaworthy in strong gales, was constructed of planks sewn together with willow withys, the hull then sealed with pitch.

I'm not surprised by this, given the huge ranges of earlier species, some of whach could only have happened via island hopping. "will it float"" is one of the earliest experiments very young children perform, usually to the consternation of adults. Rafts and canoes would logically follow, made of wood or skin stretched over whalebone since rocks don't float.