The timeline for when humans first took to the seas keeps getting moved back.  A few years ago, stone tools were found on the island of Crete which were dated to 130,000 years ago. Likewise, stone implements on the island of Flores in Indonesia have been dated back to 700,000 to 800,000. Both Crete and Flores could only have been reached by some sort of boat or raft. Likewise, human remains and stone tools found in Spain dating to over a million years ago may indicate that some ancient hominin navigated the hazardous Straits of Gibraltar from Morocco.

Recently, a researcher has offered a new theory, suggesting that Homo erectus, a hominid predecessor to modern Homo sapiens, could have been a sailor and might have been the first to develop language in order to communicate while underway on a boat.   

As reported by the Guardian: “Oceans were never a barrier to the travels of Erectus. He traveled all over the world, traveled to the island of Flores, across one of the greatest ocean currents in the world,” said Daniel Everett, professor of global studies at Bentley University, and author of How Language Began. “They sailed to the island of Crete and various other islands. It was intentional: they needed craft and they needed to take groups of twenty or so at least to get to those places.” 

While Everett is not the first to raise the controversial possibility that H. erectus might have fashioned some sort of seagoing vessel, he believes that such capabilities mean that H. erectus must also have had another skill: language.

“Erectus needed language when they were sailing to the island of Flores. They couldn’t have simply caught a ride on a floating log because then they would have been washed out to sea when they hit the current,” said Everett, presenting his thesis at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin. “They needed to be able to paddle. And if they paddled they needed to be able to say ‘paddle there’ or ‘don’t paddle.’ You need communication with symbols not just grunts.”

 Homo erectus, or “upright man,” emerged around 2 million years ago and died out within the last 50,000 to 100,000 years.