Were the First Americans from Europe?

Interesting article in today's New York Times outlining evidence that the Americas might have been settled by the Solutrean people of Iberia, sometime around 20,000 BC. A number of stone points and other tools have been found on the east coast, both on land and some miles out to sea, that have been indirectly but consistently dated to that time period, which is considerably earlier than most evidence for a migration via Siberia. A much larger Arctic ice cap and lower sea levels might have allowed a "coastal" voyage (i.e., along the edge of the ice cap) from Europe to North America, and the lower sea levels would explain the tools dredged up by fishing boats some miles offshore: they would have been on dry land when deposited. 


And so, there is speculation that the Solutrean people might have had skin-on-frame boats, and that they migrated east-to-west, living a kind of pre-Inuit maritime hunting culture and not stopping until they reached the relatively benign climate of the Chesapeake Bay.


Even if this speculation is correct, it doesn't imply that the Solutreans then went on the populate the Americas. A small East Coast colony might have remained for some time and then died out, leaving the Americas again unpopulated until about 15,000 BC, when the Siberian migration took place. 

Seagoing Capabilities of Monohull Dugouts

Landstrom's reconstruction of a

Greek galley of the Homeric era.
Click any image to enlarge.

In a recent post about competing concepts for the reconstruction of Greek galleys of the Homeric era, I suggested that the one championed by Bjorn Landstrom seemed unlikely due to its apparent lack of seaworthiness. My assumption was that the boat – a long, sleek monohull dugout equipped with rowing outriggers, but no outrigger floats – had too little stability and too little freeboard to venture outside of well-protected waters. To counter this argument, reader Edwin Deady, who maintains the website Dark Age Boats, called my attention to the Monoxylon II experiment, which amply demonstrated the seagoing capabilities of an open monohull dugout of an even more ancient design.

Conducted in 1998, the Monoxylon II Expedition sought to determine whether dugouts could have been the vehicle for cultural transmission in southern Europe around 7,000 BC. This was the time at which the Mesolithic began to give way to the Neolithic in Europe, as evidenced by the spread of agriculture, animal husbandry, new pottery styles and other technological advances. There's ample evidence that the beginnings of the new technical complex in Europe were imported from western Asia, not homegrown. And since its initial appearance in Europe was not only along the mainland shores of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, but also on numerous islands, it must have been transmitted, at least in part, by boat.

Evidence about the nature of those boats appeared in 1994 with the discovery of a large, well-preserved oak dugout in Lake Bracciano, on Italy's west coast. Although discovered in a lake, the boat's size (35 feet LOA; beam of 3.5 feet at the stern and 2.5 feet forward) appear excessive for lake use. It is thought that higher sea levels at the time to which the boat has been radiocarbon dated (5450 BC) would have caused the lake to be connected to the sea by a river, so there is good reason to believe it was a seacraft.

The canoe had four braces, created by leaving original material standing proud on the interior surface, in the manner of ribs. The recovered hull's thickness varied from 2 to 4 cm., but it is thought that the wood may have compressed over the millennia, and that the original thickness may have been about 5 cm. The possibility of the use of sail is suggested by the presence of a rectangular notch in the bottom (a possible mast step?) and some fragments of textile, but the evidence is far from conclusive. Paddles were more likely the primary means of propulsion.

Monoxylon II, with a crew of eleven.

In 1988, Czech archaeologist Radomir Tichy led a team that recreated the Lake Bracciano dugout quite faithfully. The finished replica was some 1.25 meters shorter than the original, not by plan, but because rot was discovered in the trunk partway through construction. This truncation also resulted in the elimination of one of the four "ribs" in the replica. Because the upper edges of the Lake Bracciano boat had been lost and its full height is therefore unknown, the replica's depth, at 90 cm, was a guess. A substantial amount of construction was done with Neolithic-style stone tools to prove the concept, after which iron tools were substituted for efficiency. The experimenters estimated that to build the entire boat using only Neolithic tools would require only 300 man-hours.

That same year, the team campaigned the canoe in various locations around the northern shores of the Mediterranean. Various crews of 8 to 10 paddlers plus a helmsman on a steering oar put about 500 miles under the boat's keel in a variety of conditions. With the boat's center of gravity below the waterline, the crew found stability to be very good, even in 2-meter waves (although bailing was necessary in those conditions). The boat was not noticeably affected by current, but headwinds greatly impeded progress. (They paddled in conditions up to 7-9 Beaufort.) Average speed under all conditions was 4 km/hr. Cargo of more than 100 kg. of obsidian (an early trade good), plus water and bagged wheat did not overload the boat. With a total load of nearly a ton (cargo plus crew), the paddlers felt that much heavier loads would have been both feasible and safe.

Tichy concluded that the dugout was indeed a viable vehicle by which the "Neolithicization" of Europe might have occurred. Some islands in the Mediterranean would have required more than a single day's paddling to reach, but none, apparently, were out of the practical range of a well-built monohull dugout, and "it would be possible to travel the whole coast of the Western Mediterranean up to Sicily in at most several months of persistent going," Tichy wrote.

According to Tichy, "A place probably without preneolithic occupation could be colonised by a group of 40 people with the necessary minimum amount of domesticated animals and crops a total of 15-18 ton load (sic). The load would be carried with 10 to 15 boats, each of them would take one to two tons."

I believe Tichy is here referring to colonization of a carefully planned nature – a conscious intent to establish a permanent community en masse. I think the process could also have occurred on a much smaller scale, with possibly as few as one or two boats containing one or two families and a couple of goats striking out to set up a farmstead on unoccupied land across a strait or down the coast.

Afterword: Once I got going on this post, I realized that monohull dugouts have proven themselves as seagoing vessels in more modern times than the Neolithic, or even the Greek Bronze Age. The Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest famously conducted whaling, warfare, and trade in their huge cedar canoes from Alaska to California well into the 19th century, and from 1901 to 1904, Capt. John Voss took his modified Nootka dugout Tilikum two-thirds of the way around the world. The Maoris also built enormous monohull dugouts into the historic era, and it is thought that these may have been the vehicle by which New Zealand was colonized from Polynesia prior to 1100 AD.

Acknowledgments: Much of this post derives from the English-translation appendix to Monoxylon II by Radomir Tichy (Dobrodruzstvi Experimentalni Archaeologie, 1999). Also consulted was this article in Discover. Many thanks to Edwin Deady for his inspiration and assistance on this post.

Dugouts Coexisting with Bark Canoes

There's a tendency to think of the birchbark canoe as dominating New England, the northern states west to about Minnesota, and the bordering Canadian provinces west to about the same longitude. At the same time, we think of the dugout canoe as dominating the Pacific northwest, the south Atlantic states, and the Mississippi River valley...and never the twain shall meet.

It wasn't really quite that neat. In the Northeast, for example, Maine represents the southernmost range in which the white birch grows to sufficient size to produce canoe skins. Nice sheets of canoe bark were a valuable trade item, exported by Indians from Maine and Quebec to nearby states, and so some bark canoe building did occur somewhat south of Maine. But dugouts were much more widely used than bark canoes throughout most of New England, including southwestern Maine.

Let's start in prehistory. Although the date for the invention of the birchbark canoe is in dispute (some say it might have been just prior to European contact; others place it some 500 or 600 years earlier), it is clear that dugouts were widely used throughout coastal Maine prior to that, including areas that would later become birchbark country. As far back as the Early Archaic (10,000 to 8,000 BP), tools such as gouges and whetstones were in use -- tools that may well have been used to hollow tree trunks for canoes. By the Moorehead phase (6,000 to 4,000 BP) of the Middle Archaic, there is clearer evidence. Finds of numerous swordfish bills and quantities of cod and seal bones in archaeologically excavated coastal settlement sites are sure indicators that the people were venturing away from the shore, and since the bark canoe certainly did not exist at that time, the dugout is the only craft in which they could have done so.

The earliest dugout of which I've read from the region we're discussing (New England through the U.S. midwest, and adjacent Canadian provinces) is a 2,000-year old example discovered in Lake Mary, Kenosha County, Wisconsin.

In 1634, the poet William Wood, who produced the first detailed map of southern New England, described dugout building in Massachusetts, writing that they were not greater than 2' wide and about 20' long. An eastern white pine dugout discovered in Weymouth, Massachusetts in 1965 (image at top of post) measured 11' x 2 ' 11" and has been dated to about 1500 A.D. -- i.e., before European contact. Three dugouts found in 2001 near Worcester, Massachusetts, date to the mid-1600s -- a time at which contact had occurred, but may not have yet significantly influenced the Nipmucs living some 75 miles west of Plymouth. For details on this find, which is an active achaeological project, see Project Mishoon.) A pine canoe found on Lake Ossipee, New Hampshire, and owned by the Museum of New Hampshire's History, has been dated to between 1430 and 1660.

In 1643, Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, described the local dugout canoe, or mishoon:

Mishoon an Indian boat or Canow made of a Pine or Oake, or Chestnut-tree: I have scene a Native goe into the woods with his hatchet, carrying onely a Basket of Come with him, and stones to strike fire when he hadJeld his tree (being a chestnut) he made him a little House or shed of the bark of it, he puts fire andfollowes the burning of it with fire, in the midst of many places. his come he boyles and hath the Brooke by him, and sometimes Angles for a little fish; but so tree continues burning and hewing untill he bath within ten or twelve dayes (lying there at his worke alone) finished and (getting hands) ranched his Boater with which afterward tree ventures out toflsh in the Ocean.... Some of lthe canoesl will not well carry above three or foure: but some of them twenty, thirty, forty men.... Their owne reason hath taught them, to pull of a Coat or two and set it up on a small pole, with which they will saile before a wind ten, or twenty mile.... It is wonderfull to see how they will Denture in those Canoes, and how (being oft overset as I have my selfe been with them) they will swim a mile, yea two or more safe to Land I having been necessitated to passe waters diverse times with them, it hath pleased God to make them many times the instruments of my preservation. and when sometimes In great danger I have questioned safety, they have said to me: Feare not, if we be overset I will carry you safe to Land.... (this quote taken in full from Rhode Island Sea Grant, here).

In a series of posts (titled, confusingly, Michigan's Whitewood Canoes, Whitewood Dugout Canoes VI, and Whitewood Canoes VII) on his inactive but still present eponymous blog, Jim Woodruff explains that southern Michigan was south of the range for canoe birch, but within the northern limit of the range of the tuliptree or yellow poplar, known to settlers as whitewood. Early settlers found very large whitewood dugouts in wide use there by the local Pottawatomie people, being used even for lengthy voyages on Lake Michigan. In contrast, the Chippewas or Ojibwas in northern Michigan were bark canoe builders, but they too were known to build and use dugouts. A 30-footer was acquired by a Euro-American from a Chippewa in 1837 and, in 1864, a large number of dugouts were built and used for a Chippewa migration. Whether this was an expedient due to pressure from Euro-American settlers, or an established element of their material culture, is not clear from Woodruff's post. (In the migration incident cited, the canoes were built somewhat inland, and hauled by wagon to the nearest waterway -- obviously not part of the indigenous technology.)

Woodruff goes on to argue that the dugouts used in Michigan were not as cumbersome as is often supposed -- he cites evidence that they were at least sometimes portaged. (Tuliptree is a particularly lightweight wood, and dugouts can be hewn to sufficient thinness so that they aren't outside the range of what even today's canoeists might consider portagable.) And he notes the one great advantage of the dugout: its toughness. One can drag a dugout over rocks and snags that would hole a birchbark canoe.

Finally, a paper by Edward S. Rogers ("The Dugout Canoe in Ontario", American Antiquity, Vol. 30, #4, April 1965) describes 18 dugouts in that province, ranging from 10' to 20'3", and built of basswood, pine, and possibly poplar. The paper found instances of both native and European construction of dugouts in Ontario. It was unable to determine unambiguously whether dugouts were used prehistorically or if they were a technological adoption by Indians in the historic period. Regardless, it appears that dugouts were not rare in Ontario even into the early 20th century.

(The image at the top of this post shows the dugout discovered in 1965 near Weymouth, Massachusetts, and on display in the Tufts Library in Weymouth. It is from The New England Indians: An Illustrated Sourcebook of Authentic Details of Everyday Indian Life, 2nd ed., by C. Keith Wilbur. Link below.)

Visiting the Neolithic Dordogne by Canoe

Wow. A homepage article in the New York Times featuring a canoe trip!

First Boats, First Voyagers?

A good friend gave me a copy of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies for Christmas. I'm about halfway through it -- good stuff, indeed. Early on, there's an interesting passage about the probable use of watercraft a long, long time ago. I'll quote at some length:

The Great Leap Forward (what Diamond calls the evolution from earlier versions of man to Cro-Magnons, the first fully modern humans) coincides with the first proven major extenion of human geographic range since our ancestors' colonization of Eurasia. That extension consisted of the occupation of Australia and New Guinea, joined at that time into a single continent. Many radiocarbon-dated sites attest to human presence in Autralia/New Guinea between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago (plus the inevitable somewhat older claims of contested validity). Within a short time of that initial peopling, humans had expanded over the whole continent and adapted to its diverse habitats, from the tropical rain forests and high mountains of New Guinea to the dry interior and wet southeastern corner of Australia.
During the Ice Ages, so much of the oceans' water was locked up in glaciers that worldwide sea levels dropped hundreds of feet below their present stand. As a result, what are now the shallow seas between Asia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and Bali became dry land. (So did other shallow straits, such as the Bering Strait and the English Channel.) The edge of the Southeast Asian mainland then lay 700 miles east of its present location. Nevertheless, central Indonesian islands between Bali and Australia remained surrounded and separated by deep-water channels. To reach Australia/New Guinea from the Asian mainland at that time still required crossing a minimum of eight channels, the broadest of which was at least 50 miles wide. Most of those channels divided islands visible from each other, but Australia itself was always invisible from even the nearest Indonesian islands, Timor and Tanimbar. Thus, the occupation of Australia/New Guinea is momentous in that it demanded watercraft and provides by far the earliest evidence of their use in history. Not until about 30,000 years later (13,000 years ago) is there strong evidence of watercraft anywhere else in the world, from the Mediterranean.
Initially, archaeologists considered the possibility that the colonization of Australia/New Guinea was achieved accidentally by just a few people swept to sea while fishing on a raft near an Indonesian island. In an extreme scenario the first settlers are pictured as having consisted of a single pregnant young woman carrying a male fetus. But believers in the fluke-colonization theory have been surprised by recent discoveries that still other islands, lying to the east of New Guinea, were colonized soon after New Guinea itself, by around 35,000 years ago. Those islands were New Britain and New Ireland, in the Bismarck Archipelago, and Buka, in the Solomon Archipelago. Buka lies out of sight of the closest island to the west and could have been reached only by crossing a water gap of about 100 miles. Thus, early Australians and new Guineans were probably capable of intentionally traveling over water to visible islands, and were using watercraft sufficiently often that the colonization of even invisible distant island was repeatedly achieved unintentionally.

Wow. 40,000 years ago! You go, boat people.