How Long Have Humans Been Sailing?

Sailing is the oldest of our recreations, with the exception of hunting and fishing. The history of our sport is not hundreds, nor thousands, but hundreds of thousands of years older than tennis, golf, biking, or skiing. The earliest undoubted evidence of human voyaging is the settling of Australia by the aboriginal discoverers. They could not have reached it without an ocean passage of twenty-five miles or more. Further back, there is trustworthy evidence of human habitation on Crete 130,000 years ago, before Homo sapiens were in Europe, which implies those explorers were Neanderthals. Crete has been an island sixty miles from the mainland for millions of years. But the most radical possibility for early voyagers is the case of Homo floresiensis, also known as the “hobbit people,” who inhabited the island of Flores in Indonesia a million years ago. As to the common theory that any of these folks were accidentally blown by storms to these destinations, this ignores the fact that in order to gain a sustained foothold, which is what they did, you need quite a number of fellow pioneers to start, including, obviously, females. It required repeated, planned trips in some kind of boat. Despite all the fluctuations in weather, sea level, and human interaction since those early times, the ocean waters you sail on now are the same as those faced by these early voyagers. Besides boats, another ancient technology is cordage. On my first day at Tradewinds as a beginner, I was struck by the fact that in the twentieth century, ropes were being used to control the boat. Ropes? We have servos and actuators and hydraulics. What is with this primitive gear? Like the first boats, ancient cordage, made of organic things like vines or sinew, doesn’t survive through the ages so we lack archaeological proof. The earliest hominid technology we have evidence of, over three million years ago, is stone tools. Knapping stone tools is not easy, and takes skill and foresight. It is much less difficult to strip leaves off a vine, creating a rope. Again, nameless people, who weren’t yet human, thought up a simple contrivance to help with their lives that we still use today. The connection to these earliest technological innovators is part of the heritage I became aware of through sailing.