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Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

> since there’s no evidence that Mesolithic people were seafarers, who knows if there were people living there?

Whyyyyyy?

To hedge your bets with "no evidence" that these people managed to navigate shallow sea waters to a nearby island, which they had inhabited for thousands of years and knew like the back of their hand, seems… unnecessary? Disrespectful?

I mean, we already know Mesolithic "hunter gatherers" managed absolutely mind-boggling feats of both art and engineering. More is becoming known every year, and it consistently amazes us in the direction of "No way!"

Building a boat / canoe for island-hopping over well-mapped marshes and shallow seas is the least of it.

If speculate on "no evidence" we must, my bet goes 100% in the opposite direction: The gradual increase in sea levels prompted new inventions and spectacular constructions, now lost to time. As far as speculations go, it seems a safer bet than "couldn't paddle".

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Here are some citations which support you.

From https://researchframeworks.org/maritime/the-mesolithic/#sect...

> Evidence for Mesolithic seafaring includes the colonisation of islands involving long sea journeys, such as Shetland and the Outer Hebrides (Warren 2005), as well as the location of sites on islands involving very difficult sea crossings, such as Ynys Enlli (Bardsey Island) in North Wales, where one must negotiate the treacherous Swnt Enlli (Edmonds et al 2009).

From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544031...

> Tolan-Smith (2008, 151) notes that at this point there is clear evidence for Mesolithic seafaring, with Ireland being occupied along with the Isle of Man, Rhum, the Hebridean Archipelago and Howick on the East coast of England. Thus, as Warren (2005) and Garrow and Sturt (2011) have argued, there is ample evidence for a strong seafaring tradition in the Mesolithic.

Thanks for the links. I was starting to wonder whether I'd said something unforgivably controversial.

What Doggerland – and underwater archeology in general – has to reveal is quite exciting. How did these Mesolithic people conceptualize the world and themselves? What innovations and dead-ends "didn't quite make it" (in the evolutionary sense) to the start of protohistory, to us today?

So much of the juiciest evidence from that era is now under the sea!

And which of those now-dead innovations were genuinely obsoleted ideas, and which died out due to ecological happenstance? A bad timing, bad place for an otherwise brilliant life hack… especially on the psychological/cultural/spiritual front.

Unfortunately such aspects of prehistory are the hardest to piece together. But given the jaw-dropping accomplishments of many Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples, and given the time scales, even their maladaptations must be worth a study.

In this age of Twitter, imagine something chiseled to perfection by groups of smart humans over thousands of years. Then swept away by something as "trivial" as a tsunami, or the agricultural revolution/slavery that marks the dawn of history. A truly multivariate optimization problem, with a rather shady objective function.

We can get some of this by paying more attention to other indigenous cultures.

Australian Aborigines have an oral culture with ancient roots, and life hacks that have resulted in an astonishing long-lived culture.

The Khasi, as an example of a matrilineal culture, help remind us that certain things we take for granted - like how men are supposedly more competitive than women - simply isn't true.

(https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w13727/w137... - "amongst the Khasi ... women choose the competitive environment more often than Khasi men").

Or concepts revolving around "third gender" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender .

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