16 - Pleistocene Voyaging and Maritime Dispersals in the Pacific

Summary

Until quite recently, most scholars believed that boats, seafaring, and maritime² dispersals were relatively late developments in human history, limited to the past 15,000 years or less.³ It now seems likely, however, that intentional Pleistocene voyaging played a role in the initial human colonization of at least three continents – greater Australia (aka Sahul), North America, and South America – as well as several island archipelagoes, including portions of island Southeast Asia (ISEA), the Ryukyus, and Near Oceania. These dispersals may have been facilitated by millennia of experimenting and refining boat technology along the ‘Southern Dispersal Route’, which many scholars believe early modern humans followed as they moved eastward out of Africa, along the shores of southern Asia and the northwest Pacific.⁴ If true, the nearshore marine and estuarine ecosystems of southern Asia and ISEA may have been a nursery for Late Pleistocene seafaring,⁵ as well as a springboard for the later Holocene maritime dispersals that led humans to explore and colonize the remote Pacific archipelagoes of Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia.⁶