Stone tool analysis in Southeast Asia provides evidence of seafaring technology | Hacker News Reader

Stone tool analysis in Southeast Asia provides evidence of seafaring technology

popularmechanics.com

31 pointsbookofjoe17 comments

I remember in history class, at this period humans are merely discovering stone tools and discovery of fire. Yet here, researchers presented evidence of tools from boat-makers and other technology where humans navigate on deep waters? this is crazy!

-> survivorship bias

This article is about 40,000 years ago.

Fire was controled like 1,000,000 years ago by Homo erectus and stone tools like 3,000,000 years ago by Australopithecus afarensis.

you are right, I misremembered and did not paid attention in class that much.

[I had to look up the numbers and species in Wikipedia. https://xkcd.com/903/ ]

Does anyone have a cite for the actual paper? I can't seem to access it via ScienceDirect.

There is a link in the article. https://archive.ph/o/gsoEH/https://www.sciencedirect.com/sci...

the doi is https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2025.105020

I haven't found the actual paper yet tho

Yet more evidence that Graham Hancock is right - even as far back as 10,000 years ago, humans had the technology to be a seafaring civilization with potentially a world-wide span. Could this advanced technology be the product of the ancient Lemuria civilization that was submerged when the sea-level rose after the end of the Ice Age, and is talked about in the oral tradition of South-East Asian peoples?

Thanks for that Lemuria rabbit hole!

> Could this advanced technology be the product of the ancient Lemuria civilization that was submerged when the sea-level rose after the end of the Ice Age?

No.

The people who left Sunda and crossed the Weber line to settle Sahul 50 - 60,000 years ago had to traverse about 90km of deep ocean to do so.

"Passively floating on a raft" for 90km was never really plausible.

Deep ocean today or 50kya?

Back then also, as there's a subducting tectonic plate boundary running through there - the Weber Line is somewhat similar to the shape of that boundary in that area.

The ocean reaches depths of 7000m in trenches between the Sahul and Sunda shelves, and, at least during the last glacial maximum, 21K years ago, the sea level was only 140m shallower.

Crazy!

Graham Hancock and his theory on advanced civilizations before a cataclysm feels like it's getting more and more traction given evidence like this. The previous theories of civilization starting 6000 years ago in Mesopotamia seems like it's wrong, given how hard it is to prove strong evidence like this article and other sites like Gobleki Tepe, which is 12,000+ years old.

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