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Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon
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 intensi...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7714783/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33273531 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76831-7 |
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author | Kaifu, Yousuke Kuo, Tien-Hsia Kubota, Yoshimi Jan, Sen |
author_facet | Kaifu, Yousuke Kuo, Tien-Hsia Kubota, Yoshimi Jan, Sen |
author_sort | Kaifu, Yousuke |
collection | PubMed |
description | 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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7714783 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-77147832020-12-08 Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon Kaifu, Yousuke Kuo, Tien-Hsia Kubota, Yoshimi Jan, Sen Sci Rep Article 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. Nature Publishing Group UK 2020-12-03 /pmc/articles/PMC7714783/ /pubmed/33273531 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76831-7 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Kaifu, Yousuke Kuo, Tien-Hsia Kubota, Yoshimi Jan, Sen Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title | Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title_full | Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title_fullStr | Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title_full_unstemmed | Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title_short | Palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
title_sort | palaeolithic voyage for invisible islands beyond the horizon |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7714783/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33273531 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-76831-7 |
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