Wanderlust

Maybe it's because I'm fundamentally a home body, but I find it really hard to understand what could have driven our distant ancestors to head out into uncharted territory -- no GPS to guide them, no guarantee of safety, no knowledge of what they might meet along the way.

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece about the extraordinary island-hopping accomplished by the ancient Polynesians -- going from one tiny speck of land to another, crossing thousands of kilometers of trackless ocean in dugout canoes.  We don't know what motivated them, whether it was lack of resources on their home islands, being driven away by warfare, or simple curiosity.  But whatever it was, it took no small amount of skill, courage, and willingness to accept risk.

The wanderings of the ancestral Polynesians, though, are hardly the only example of ancient humans' capacity for launching out into the unknown.  Two papers this week look at other examples of our forebears' wanderlust -- still, of course, leaving unanswered the questions about why they felt impelled to leave home and safety for an uncertain destination.

The first, which appeared in PLOS-One, looks at the similarity of culture between Bronze-Age Denmark and southwestern Norway, and considers whether the inhabitants of Denmark took a longer (but, presumably, safer) seven-hundred-kilometer route, crossing the Strait of Kattegat into southern Sweden and then hugging the coast until they reached Norway, or the much shorter (but riskier) hundred-kilometer crossing over open ocean to go there directly.

While the direct route was more dangerous, it seems likely that's what they did.  If they'd skirted along the coastline, you'd expect there to be more similarity in archaeological sites along the way, in the seaside areas of southern Sweden.  There's not.  It appears that they really did launch off in paddle-driven boats across the stormy seas between Denmark and Norway, four thousand years ago.

"These new agent-based simulations, applied with boat performance data of a Scandinavian Bronze Age type boat," the authors write, "demonstrate regular open sea crossings of the Skagerrak, including some fifty kilometers of no visible land, likely commenced by 2300 B.C.E., as indicated by archaeological evidence."

Considering people twice as far back in time, a paper this week in Nature describes evidence that seafarers from what is now Italy crossed a hundred kilometers of ocean to reach the island of Malta.  A cave in Latnija, in the northern Mellieħa region of Malta, has bones of animals that show distinct signs of butchering and cooking -- and have been dated to 8,500 years ago.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Frank Vincentz, Malta - Mellieħa - Triq il-Latnija - Paradise Bay 05 ies, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"We found abundant evidence for a range of wild animals, including Red Deer, long thought to have gone extinct by this point in time," said Eleanor Scerri, of the University of Malta, who was the paper's lead author.  "They were hunting and cooking these deer alongside tortoises and birds, including some that were extremely large and extinct today...  The results add a thousand years to Maltese prehistory and force a re-evaluation of the seafaring abilities of Europe's last hunter-gatherers, as well as their connections and ecosystem impacts."

What always strikes me about this sort of thing is wondering not only what fueled their wanderlust, but how they even knew there was an island out there to head to.  I know that patterns of clouds can tell seafarers they're nearing land, but still -- to launch off into the open ocean, hoping for the best, and trusting that there's safe landing out there somewhere still seems to me to be somewhere between brave and utterly foolhardy.

I guess my ancestors were made of sterner stuff than me.  I'm okay with that.  Being a bit of a coward has its advantages.  As Steven Wright put it, "Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines."

So if y'all want to, you can take off in your dugout canoes for parts unknown, but I'm gonna stay right here where it's (relatively) safe.  I suppose it's a good thing our forebears had the courage they did, because it's how we got here.  And I hope they wouldn't be too embarrassed by my preference for sitting on my ass drinking coffee with cream and sugar rather than spending weeks at sea nibbling on dried meat and hardtack and hoping like hell those clouds over there mean there's dry land ahead.

Chacun à son goût, y'know?

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