Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon

Yousuke Kaifu · Tien-Hsia Kuo · Yoshimi Kubota · Sen Jan

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Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology Maritime and Coastal Archaeology

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 the same since the late Pleistocene. Migration to the Ryukyus is difficult because it requires navigation across one of the world's strongest current, the Kuroshio, toward an island that lay invisible beyond the horizon. This suggests that the Palaeolithic island colonization occurred in a wide area of the western Pacific was a result of human's active and continued exploration, backed up by technological advancement.

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References

2017Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago 2011Pelagic Fishing at 42,000 Years Before the Present and the Maritime Skills of Modern Humans 2011The Global Origins and Development of Seafaring 2018When did Homo sapiens first reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?2015Emergence and diversity of modern human behavior in Paleolithic Asia 2018Least-cost pathway models indicate northern human dispersal from Sunda to Sahul 2017An early colonisation pathway into northwest Australia 70-60,000 years ago 2018Palaeogeography and voyage modeling indicates early human colonization of Australia was likely from Timor-Roti

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2025Paleolithic seafaring in East Asia: An experimental test of the dugout canoe hypothesis 2022A synthetic model of Palaeolithic seafaring in the Ryukyu Islands, southwestern Japan 2024The Pleistocene Maritime Migration of Modern Humans in Northern Wallacea: The Cases of Topogaro in Sulawesi and Bubog in Mindoro

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