Human ancestors were sailors
Ahoy! Human ancestors that left Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago to see the rest of the world were no landlubbers.
Stone hand axes unearthed on the Mediterranean island of Crete indicate that an ancient Homo species - perhaps Homo erectus - had used rafts or other seagoing vessels to cross from northern Africa to Europe via at least some of the larger islands in between, says archaeologists at Providence College in Rhode Island.
Several hundred double-edged cutting implements discovered at nine sites in southwestern Crete date to at least 130,000 years ago and probably much earlier.
Many of these finds closely resemble hand axes fashioned in Africa about 800,000 years ago by H. erectus, who had spread from Africa to parts of Asia and Europe by at least that time.
Until now, the oldest known human settlements on Crete dated to around 9,000 years ago. Traditional theories say early farming groups in southern Europe and the Middle East first navigated vessels to Crete and other Mediterranean islands at that time.
Questions remain about whether African hominids used Crete as a stepping stone to reach Europe or, in a Stone Age Gilligan's Island scenario, accidentally ended up on Crete from time to time when close-to-shore rafts were blown out to sea.
But even so, the very idea that H. erectus were using rafts, whether for food or exploration, is an amazing thought.
Weird Science Factoid: The average smell weighs 760 nanograms. We won't go into which is the heaviest smell though...
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
