[HN Gopher] Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea...
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Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
Author : gmays
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-03-20 18:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| verisimi wrote:
| https://archive.is/6N7Qr
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could have
| traversed the Sicilian Strait in long wooden canoes, navigating
| from island to island by sight. Many potential stopovers are now
| submerged, making it hard to find further evidence for these
| voyages, Lucarini adds.
|
| The title is misleading.
| monadINtop wrote:
| I don't see how that quote or the article contradicts the
| title?
| dkarl wrote:
| It's still a sea, even if you stay within sight of land.
| dgfitz wrote:
| > Many potential stopovers are now submerged, making it hard
| to find further evidence for these voyages
| nkrisc wrote:
| What's your point?
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'm so sorry, I don't understand the disconnect.
|
| > Hunter-gatherers from Europe and North Africa could
| have traversed
|
| "May" and "could have" aren't meaningful, and the quotes
| ends with additional ambiguity.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I don't see the problem. They're making a claim and have
| some evidence. That of course doesn't mean they're
| actually correct, but that's their claim.
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| You could also cross in a raft. Or on a log. You can swim
| across (riskily, quite riskily) at the straight of gibraltar
| itself. We've known humans have been seafaring tens of
| thousands of years before our earliest archaeological evidence
| (although dugout canoes are likely just as old, it's very bad
| conditions for preservation outside of stuff like northern
| european bogs/the dead sea, and they often just look like logs
| underwater, not boats)--at no point has Australia been fully
| connected to continental asia. Hell, this is true for H
| _Erectus_ , let alone h s sapiens--it's not difficult to
| believe H Erectus might have pieced together how to lash logs
| together.
|
| On articles like this, I strongly recommend just ignoring the
| title. It's enough to make anyone with a mild background in the
| subject frustrated. The research itself remains incredibly
| interesting.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _Many potential stopovers are now submerged_
|
| If I was a billionaire, I'd look into funding tech for excavating
| coastlines during the ice age(s), That's where any 10k old
| civilizations must have been.
| nradov wrote:
| It's like the old joke about the drunk who's searching for his
| lost keys under a streetlight because the light is better
| there. Archaeologists have barely begun to excavate underwater
| sites where people lived back when sea levels were much lower.
| There is surely much to discover but doing anything underwater
| increases the cost by at least 10x.
| aksss wrote:
| Take a look at Doggerland. It's been known for over 100 years
| with no lack of interest, but as you say, underwater
| archaeology is expensive and technically difficult.
| qwytw wrote:
| And it's not like there is much to find, most of the things
| people in Doggerland made were out of wood, there are no
| ancient stone ruins or lost treasures.
| jjulius wrote:
| There's a similar case to be made for the Pacific Northwest -
| there's likely a good chunk of human history beneath Puget
| Sound and the Pacific.
|
| https://www.cascadepbs.org/2011/05/lost-civilization-along-w...
| WalterBright wrote:
| How does DNA show they traveled by sea?
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(page generated 2025-03-21 23:00 UTC)