200,000-Year-Old Sailors?
An article in the July/August (2007) issue of Minerva Magazine places the origins of village life and sea travel as far back as 200,000 to 400,000 years before present (BP).
Professor Helmut Ziegert, an archaeologist at Hamburg University, has been conducting surveys and excavations for 39 years and he’s convinced that evidence from sites in Libya and Ethiopia will move the initial appearance of human civilization from 10,500 year BP back to at least 200,000 years BP and maybe well before that!
Ziegert has identified a total of 37 Lower Paleolithic sites from China to Germany that he claims support his revolutionary theory. If he’s right, the suspected ancient maritime cultures of the Caribbean and the South Pacific become much less of a mystery, given the extra 190,000 years they may have had to develop!
Read the entire Minerva article at:
http://minervamagazine.com/news.asp?min_issue=JUL_AUG2007#0