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Jared,

You raise one of the obvious objections, which has also been raised by
professional archaeologists who don't like to contemplate the idea that
Homo erectus was capable of conceiving a sea-going boat. The other
obvious objection is that the evidence for a human presence on Lombok
around 600,000 may have been misinterpreted from some combination of
natural features and anthropogenic ones from much later.

I haven't seen a serious arguments of the pros and cons on the latter
point. The counter to your argument, among professionals (which I am
not), seems to be that the scale of the site on Lombok and the low
probability that the one and only site there just happens to have been
found make it unlikely that accidental drift across the Strait can
explain what has been found. Whether that conclusion will hold up to
further investigation or not, only time will tell.

The Lombok Strait isn't wide by our standards. (I would happily attempt
it in my own 22-footer, operating under sail and oar alone.) But it
isn't exactly an easy bit of water, with strong currents sweeping south
-- feeding water from the Pacific Equatorial Current system into the
Indian Ocean. For half the year, the wind blows in the same direction,
which certainly doesn't help. Whether there is any time of year when a
log would drift from Bali to Lombok (rather than from Bali into the
Arafura Sea), I have no idea.

There has been a recent attempt to build a vessel that could have been
constructed using Palaeolithic tools. The archaeologist who published
the work, a guy called Bednarik or something like that, saw the result
as a vessel of circa 600,000, suitable for reaching Lombok, but at least
one of his associates has told me that the boat was really intended as
one of circa 60,000 which could have been used in the settlement of
Australia. The paper is in the International Journal of Nautical
Archaeology but I'd have to search for volume and page numbers.


Trevor Kenchington


You wrote:

>  I don't see why a crossing of 20+ miles should amaze anyone, even in
> 600KBC. Someone gets washed out to sea by a flood, grabs a log, floats in
> terror for 36 hours and swims ashore. If one of the opposite sex has the
> same adventure within the decade...there's a colony.


--
Trevor J. Kenchington PhD                         Gadus@iStar.ca
Gadus Associates,                                 Office(902) 889-9250
R.R.#1, Musquodoboit Harbour,                     Fax   (902) 889-9251
Nova Scotia  B0J 2L0, CANADA                      Home  (902) 889-3555

                     Science Serving the Fisheries
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