Re: Flores Man

From: Marc Verhaegen (fa204466_at_skynet.be)
Date: 10/28/04 

Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:58:14 +0200

"Algis Kuliukas" <algis@RiverApes.com> wrote in message
news:77a70442.0410271943.7f8d3364@posting.google.com...

> > "Its ancestors, probably a form of H.erectus, could have reached the
island in the hunt for stegodons one mill.yrs ago, either by building some
kind of boat or by walking across a short-lived land-bridge." - hominids
with brains of c 380 cc building boats? - "short-lived land bridges" -
where have we heard this before (A: connection between S.America & Africa to
avoid continental drift theories...)

> The concept that hominids might have swam there is too grotesque to be
contemplated, Marc.

Ah? Hominids with brains of c 380 cc buildings boats? Or constructing "land
bridges"??

> At the last glacial maximum the Wallace Line could have been less than
18km wide. Humans can cross such distances so it's highly likely that H.
erectus could too.

PV Tobias 1998 Water and human evolution Out There 3:38-44

http://allserv.rug.ac.be/~mvaneech/outthere.htm

the Indonesian island of Flores could be reached only by sea crossings even
when the sea level was lowest. Yet stone tools and fossil bones on Flores
show that humans (probably Homo erectus) and archaic elephants (Stegodon)
must have crossed this 19km-wide, deep oceanic channel 900 000 to 800 000
years ago. There is no evidence that they knew how to make boats so early.
Either they floated across using tree trunks and logs as rafts, or they
swam.

Another deep oceanic channel - the Strait of Gibraltar - lies between Ceuta
and Morocco in North Africa and Gibraltar and Spain. The strait today is
about 13 km at its narrowest point but when the sea-levels of the Atlantic
and Mediterranean were lower, the distance across was smaller and a few
islands (presently under water) would have appeared. The greatest sea
crossing then would have been only five kilometres. Stone tools and probable
fossil hominid remains between 1.5 and one million years old have been found
in south-eastern Spain near the village of Orce and the city of Murcia. For
a long time, the question has been: how did these earliest Europeans get to
the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa? There are two fairly obvious
overland routes ­ one through the Middle East across Suez and the Levant,
and one from Tripoli, via Malta, Sicily, the Strait of Messina to Calabria,
the toe of Italy. To get to the south of Spain from either of these two
passages would have involved taking the long way round, including the
crossing of the Pyrenees in a southerly direction. Several of us have been
pursuing the option of the short cut ­ the water traverse from Ceuta to
Spain. If people and elephants could get across a wider channel to get to
Flores just under a million years ago, I believe it is very likely that the
smaller water crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar would have been within
human capacity just over a million years ago. Again, floating, rafting on
flotsam and possibly even swimming seem to have been early acquisitions in
human cultural and behavioural evolution. Boats are technologically advanced
inventions which probably came much later.

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