The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [37]
Humans first went to sea in the Indian Ocean. Recent archaeological work, which supports the Out of Africa theory of human origins, found a coastal settlement on the Red Sea coast of Eritrea where people were using boats at least 125,000 years ago. These humans ate from the sea: oysters and shellfish.8 It seems that at the other end of the ocean there also were very early voyages, which led to the peopling of Australia and New Guinea. This was a momentous event, as for the first time humans settled land outside of the Afro-Eurasian landmass, moving to the connected area which is now Australia and New Guinea, called Sahul. To reach here, even when sea levels were much lower than today, required that between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago the ancestors of today's Melanesians and Australian Aborigines leave Sundaland and cross open straits at least 65 km wide, and at other periods up to 150 km wide.9 Much later, there is evidence of foraging subsistence people around the northern shores of the ocean from 7000 BCE. There was early exchange also: for example, shell beads found in northern Syria which date from the fifth millennium BCE must have come from the Indian Ocean region via the Gulf.10
Given this early association with the sea, it is quite fitting that the closest living relative of the long-extinct fish, the rhipidistia, which is the ancestor of all land vertebrate animals, was found by Jacques Cousteau off the Comoro Islands. This is the so-called 'living fossil' fish, the coelacanth, which is the world's oldest known unchanged fish species, with a physique identical to fossil coelacanths in rocks dating back 350 million years. These antique fish average 100 lbs, and are caught in depths from 500 to 1300 feet. It is a powerful carnivore with hard scales and limb-like fins. They were considered extinct, but then one was caught off the east coast of Africa, and later it turned out the Comoro Islanders fished them regularly.11
Archaeology has told us a little about the earliest boats in the Indian Ocean. In this and the next chapter we are dealing mostly with ships north of about 10° S: only when Europeans opened the Cape route, and later a direct passage from the Cape to Western Australia and then up to Indonesia, did the lower half of the ocean see much traffic. The earliest boats were canoes made of reeds, though not the papyrus of Egypt, and are still to be found in the marsh areas of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. In this area they are made of the berdi reed. Reeds are bundled together, and then these bundles are tied together to make a ship. There is some debate over whether or not they were coated with asphalt to make them more water tight. Many reed boats got their buoyancy only from the sum total of the buoyancy of the materials they were made of, and so usually sat very low in the water. Thor Heyerdahl built a large one, some 60 feet long, and taking a crew of about twelve. He found it laborious indeed to sail.12
It is a long step from reed boats to wooden boats built to be watertight, gaining their buoyancy from enclosed air. Wooden boats go back very far, to the time of the Indus Valley