Pre-historic Island Hopping

[Shroom Man 777]

Thinking about Polynesians and those Pacific Islands... I wonder what possessed those great and ancient peoples from prehistoric times to actually try crossing the motherfucking ocean on nothing but flimsy wooden things. Think about it. I am a primitive ancient human and I see this vast expanse of water and I am scared. Why would the very first oceanic explorer dare to venture forth beyond the comfortable confines of his seaside home?

An idea I have is that during the Ice Age or the time when island-chains were linked by land bridges, these primitive people were able to just walk willy-nilly into far away lands. That's one of the theories on how pre-historic Philippines got populated by primitive humans, they just walked from mainland asia.

Now, the land bridges didn't last forever. These ancient roads of prehistoric civilization eventually got swallowed by the sea - Atlantis - and this means a lot of folks got drowned or displaced. Folks who've immigrated to those faraway lands in search of greener pastures find themselves gradually isolated by the rising ocean.

Nonetheless, legends of how "elders crossed the seas and found new land" probably circulated amongst these island folks. Tales of epic deeds of how their grand-pappys ventured forth from their ancient homes in search of greener pastures, battling giant enemy crabs and octopussies as they did so.

Anyway, it's not such a stretch to imagine that these island folks would eventually run out of island resources. Famine, drought, calamity, or even through their own damned idiocy - like Easter Island. Their greener pastures might not stay so green and eventually they turn to their old legends, stories, their histories.

Now, there are no more land bridges, but they can still remember how their ancestors traveled, how their origin was from this ancient and mythic "mainland". So, a few smart dudes decided to put some wood together and since the oceans have swallowed up the land bridges of old, they try to go home the hard way.

They don't find the mainland, that mythological homes of their ancestors, but they do find other islands. Possibly isolated and with green pastures, perhaps inhabited by other peoples who could be hospitable and friendly, new brothers, or hostile - to be killed and wiped out or enslaved.

This could be the founding of the island-hopping cultures that originated the Filipinos, the Polynesians, the Indonesians and Malays and etcetera.

Either way, it makes for a really interesting and epic tale. We don't need shitty CGI dino-birds, Atlanteans, or motherfucking pyramids. What say you?

It is late and my brain is frizzled up.

[Enforcer Talen]

Also, a lot of colonization might have started involuntarily - family on a boat gets hit in a storm and swept out to a new island.

[Gil Hamilton]

Well, you aren't going to find alot of landbridges, given that the islands in the Pacific tend to be volcanic and thus are geologically independant of each other.

Chances are alot of them may have done it to chase new fishing, got lost and blown out to ocean, populations pressure, stuff like that. Chances are it killed a fair bit of them. It's amazing, but it can be managed with large canoes.

[cosmicalstorm]

I imagine that for every sucessfull journey across larger distances there must have been a thousand who failed.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, you aren't going to find alot of landbridges, given that the islands in the Pacific tend to be volcanic and thus are geologically independant of each other.

Yeah, but I can imagine it was like what I said in the OP (with the land bridges) out in the areas near the Asian mainland - archipelagos like the Philippines and Indonesia and places like Australia - in the beginning. And then when these primitive folks figured out that crossing the great and freaky-scary ocean was possible, people would've started getting boats and gone island-hopping.

After unbelievable effort and a long span of time, with many lost and dead, with accidents and intentional explorations, you'd see folks starting to populate those faraway Pacific places too.

Chances are alot of them may have done it to chase new fishing, got lost and blown out to ocean, populations pressure, stuff like that. Chances are it killed a fair bit of them. It's amazing, but it can be managed with large canoes.

I can imagine "exoduses" with large canoes full of families being led (or driven away) by messianic figures. The Great Ocean! Spirit-Journey! Ahoy!

Damn, that time of pre-historic exploration would've been more than a match for any of the later ages of exploration and colonization. Those societies would be quite a sight to behold.

Far more interesting than stories about false gods and pyramids and heart-eating Mayztecans with mastodons, at least.

[Broomstick]

Jared Diamond in Collapse tells of a Pacific Island that has maintained a stable population for centuries. Nowadays, when the numbers exceed the island's capacity, a certain number of islanders are chosen to emigrate to other places. In the old days, however, a canoe or three would be given to the "excess" people who would then set off onto the ocean, never to return. Given that many going on these voyages were elderly or crippled this was really a fancy form of suicide for the most part, but a certain number of these expeditions probably did find another island, either one that was uninhabited or that might have been willing to take them (islands also had occasional population crashes). No need for messianic figures, just the brutal equations involved in survival on limited resources.

And no, most of the Pacific islands were never connected by land bridges. They really did get settled by boat.

[Frank Hipper]

Ancient Polynesian navigation techniques were good enough for a trained navigator to detect previously unknown land masses by wave patterns alone, and at a considerable distance.

While there's no good reason to imagine the earliest Pacific expansions as being anything but island hopping, by the the time of the occupation of Hawaiian chain and Easter Island, such was not the case.

[speaker-to-trolls]

As far as SE Asia, Papua New Guinea and Australia go I think that's pretty much what happened, although a certain amount of canoing was needed. Then later, much later, population pressure just got too much and people were forced out into the depthless Pacific to find new lands. What do I mean by much later? Well, New Zealand was colonised by Polynesians by around 500AD, the time that the Roman Empire was collapsing, and Hawaii wasn't colonised until about 1000 AD, the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe. So it wasn't really prehistoric from our perspective, but that doesn't make the idea of crossing the greatest open ocean in the world in a wooden canoe any less epic.

[Shroom Man 777]

I have obviously misjudged the time-scale of this.

[quote=Broomstick]And no, most of the Pacific islands were never connected by land bridges. They really did get settled by boat.[/quote]

Yeah, but assuming that these island-hoppers originated from mainland Asia, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that their ancestors started "hopping" to the SE Asian and Australian regions that were connected via land bridges. And as things got more desperate or bolder, they went on and braved the great Pacific to go to the majority of these unconnected islands. On wooden canoes.

Damn, that thing with forcing (old) folks out of the islands is pretty brutal.

[quote=Frank Hipper]Ancient Polynesian navigation techniques were good enough for a trained navigator to detect previously unknown land masses by wave patterns alone, and at a considerable distance.[/quote]

I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how that can possibly work. That is simply incredible.

[Frank Hipper]

I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how that can possibly work. That is simply incredible.

Experiment for yourself:

Go to your bathroom sink, fill it with water.

Lightly tap a finger tip in the water to produce uniform waves, and then place a fingertip of your other hand in it, and watch waves reflect off of it.

Ocean swells are relatively uniform, barring certain circumstances, and when the reach a landmass, will reflect or bounce smaller waves off of it.

Original Polynesian stick chart displaying basic principles.

That's likely a teaching aid; here's a more complicated one.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Polynesians were master navigators. The shape of the horizon, the smell of the air, even the kinds of fish under the boat all told them everything they needed to about how far away land was and which directions they were in. Your 'land bridges' only take you as far as New Zealand and the Phillippines. To get to Hawaii, French Polynesia, or Easter Island required weeks of journey on outrigger canoes. Ironically, the 'elderly' mentioned in previous posts would have the MOST skill navigating, and be the best-suited to find a tiny island surrounded by 400 miles of water.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, it depends on WHERE you're talking about, and WHEN.

For example, the settlement of Australia 40,000+ years ago by simple dugouts was a lot easier than it sounds, because back then, the Arafura Sea, the Gulf of Carpentaria, and the Torres straight were all above water; that's right, Australia and New Guinea are actually one continent, called Sahul by geologists, which was, until 13,000 years ago (the end of the last ice age), connected to each other by an extremely broad swathe of land. The Moluccas were much larger then, too, and most of Indonesia was connected together. About the only exception was the very deep rift-water along the Wallace Line, which has never been dry--but that means there was only one major strait to worry about it. Perhaps two days of rowing. So colonizing Sahul--Austroguinea--was not as hard as it seems today, for our very ancient ancestors. But Oceania proper, or Melanesia and Micronesia? That was done by boat on the open ocean. For that matter, so was the colonization of Madagascar--which was done by Malays, not by Africans.

Oh, and chew on this one--the Falklands had a wolf species on them when people first arrived. They were never connected to the mainland. That means there had to be an earlier, prior settlement on the small wooden canoes from Argentina that ultimately failed (the nearest genetic relatives of these wolves are there) but their tamed wolves managed to survive and go on.

[Junghalli]

Damn, that time of pre-historic exploration would've been more than a match for any of the later ages of exploration and colonization. Those societies would be quite a sight to behold.

There is a section on Atomic Rockets where it compares the colonization of Polynesia to interstellar colonization (in a no-FTL universe). It makes a much better analogy than the European age of exploration.

[Adrian Laguna]

The main difficulty in crossing any ocean is navigation. This Norwegian guy named Thor Heyerdahl proved in 1947 that Inca bamboo rafts were sea worthy enough to cross the Pacific ocean. Then in 1969 he had some Chadian boat builders make him an ancient Egyptian papyrus raft which he launched from Morocco with the intention of making it to America. That one sunk due to incompetence on the part of the crew. The next year, boatmen from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia made him a similar raft, which he also launched from Morocco and successfully sailed to Barbados. Thus showing that you don't need high technological sophistication to be capable of physically doing the trip. Again, the problem is navigation, Heyerdahl was a ballsy guy, but even he took along charts, a sextant, a radio, and some time pieces.

[Broomstick]

Damn, that thing with forcing (old) folks out of the islands is pretty brutal.

Having everyone on an island die for lack of food is pretty brutal, too.

Mind you, it was seldom necessary to march these folks into the canoe by spear-point. These people were willing to go and sacrifice themselves (keeping in mind it wasn't hopeless, just highly unlikely they'd find a refuge) for the benefit of their children and other relatives. Other civilizations have done the same, such as people in arctic regions walking out into storms so there would be more food for the young and healthy. Nobody enjoyed it, and now that it's unnecessary it's not done anymore, but at the time it really was a matter of a few sacrificing for the good of all. If you also keep in mind that these people did not have access to anything we'd call effective medicine or painkillers, the lot of the elderly and crippled wasn't a pleasant one even when food was plentiful and it was possible to care for them without jeopardizing everyone else's survival.

[Mayabird]

The Polynesians had a belief that bright stars marked islands, and so if they were planning on going on a big voyage of exploration, they'd set out for a place marked by a bright star. In a few cases, they did luck out - for instance, Arcturus for Hawaii and Sirius for Tahiti.

There are also lots of other ways of knowing that land is nearby without being able to see it. Cloud formations that are different over land or sea, or the presence of different species of birds. There was also their aforementioned skill in reading currents and waves. Granted, a lot of this is knowledge they could only gain after being at sea for generations, but even before the great explorations, they sent out fishing boats into the deep blue sea.

[Patrick Degan]

The main difficulty in crossing any ocean is navigation. This Norwegian guy named Thor Heyerdahl proved in 1947 that Inca bamboo rafts were sea worthy enough to cross the Pacific ocean. Then in 1969 he had some Chadian boat builders make him an ancient Egyptian papyrus raft which he launched from Morocco with the intention of making it to America. That one sunk due to incompetence on the part of the crew. The next year, boatmen from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia made him a similar raft, which he also launched from Morocco and successfully sailed to Barbados. Thus showing that you don't need high technological sophistication to be capable of physically doing the trip. Again, the problem is navigation, Heyerdahl was a ballsy guy, but even he took along charts, a sextant, a radio, and some time pieces.

Yes, the Kon-Tiki and Ra expeditions. I got lucky enough recently to have found a copy of Heyerdahl's book on the former in an antique shop to replace the copy my mother had, which was among the many many books lost to the New Orleans flood.

[Elfdart]

The Norse crossed the Atlantic over a thousand years ago with only their knack for sailing and a bearing dial (which is amazingly accurate for getting longitude and easy to make) to navigate. There's no reason to think that people in other parts of the world couldn't have studied currents, weather, birds and shadows on a flat surface to navigate.

[PainRack]

Yeah, but assuming that these island-hoppers originated from mainland Asia, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine that their ancestors started "hopping" to the SE Asian and Australian regions that were connected via land bridges. And as things got more desperate or bolder, they went on and braved the great Pacific to go to the majority of these unconnected islands. On wooden canoes.

Or population pressure and war. There's supposed to be archaelogical evidence that the Southern Chinese expanded and pushed the Polynesians out to Formosa, and from there, out to the rest of Polynesia. And of course, the southern Chinese were then pushed out by later chinese and the Han chinese.

[Frank Hipper]

The Norse crossed the Atlantic over a thousand years ago with only their knack for sailing and a bearing dial (which is amazingly accurate for getting longitude and easy to make) to navigate. There's no reason to think that people in other parts of the world couldn't have studied currents, weather, birds and shadows on a flat surface to navigate.

The claim for this so-called "Bearing Dial" is based on a single archeological find of a fragmentary oak disc that is so imprecise and crudely carved that it only becomes practical when significantly enlarged (a reconstruction of the original fragment would only be 2.75 inches in diameter) and redrawn with far greater precision.
Faithfully executed reconstructions of the original artifact do not work; the "bearing dial" argument is a classic shoehorning of evidence to fit a preconceived notion.

Further, there is no reference to such a thing in any of the surviving records, records which do, however, give entirely practical sailing directions from Norway to Iceland and Greenland without the use of any instruments other than the human eye.