Reaching Sahul required seafaring over 50,000 years ago
Maritime history studies human life with the sea—fishing, navies, law, ships, and ocean science—often globally. Rafts may be older than a million years if Homo erectus crossed straits; reaching Greater Australia (Sahul) demanded sea voyages some 50,000 or more years ago.
No one knows when the first seafarer set out, but settling Sahul meant hopping between the islands of Wallacea with working boats. The oldest surviving vessel is the Pesse canoe from the Netherlands, carbon-dated to between 8040 and 7510 BCE, while rock art in Valle, Norway, shows a boat more than four metres long carved 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. The first known sea trade route ran in the Aegean in the 7th millennium BCE, when an unknown Neolithic people shipped obsidian from the volcanic island of Milos to the Balkans, Anatolia and Cyprus.
Clay models and painted discs from Ubaid-era Mesopotamia, around 3500 to 3000 BCE, show reed boats bound in rope lattices and sealed with bitumen, and one pottery shard may show a mast and sail, the earliest hint of the technology. Egyptian images of sails follow around 3100 BCE. Austronesians, leaving Taiwan around 3000 BCE, used lashed-lug hulls, catamarans and crab-claw sails, and before the 16th century they were the most widespread language family on Earth, stretching from Easter Island to Madagascar.
As a discipline, maritime history ranges across whaling, maritime law, shipbuilding, cartography, lighthouses, seaside resorts and sailors' social lives, and it includes inland waters such as the Great Lakes. Traditionalists write for fellow academics, while utilitarians aim at policymakers. Merchant shipping and navies are usually studied separately. Critics nicknamed the older focus on vessel detail rivet counting; since the 1980s scholars have turned to the people aboard, and since 2000 to sea travel as part of transport and mobility, a shift linked to Marcus Rediker and Black Atlantic studies.
Michael W. Jung's sub-oceanic history looks beneath the surface, tracing how freediving, scuba, submersibles and remote vehicles made the ocean interior accessible, knowable and controllable. Hattendorf's four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History gathers more than 900 articles by 400 scholars.
Source: Maritime history
