[roccman]

Posted by a good friend of mine Bill Tamblyn over at ERT.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '[')url=http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080319114619.htm]****Oceangoing sailing rafts plied the waters of the equatorial Pacific long before Europeans arrived in the Americas, and carried tradegoods for thousands of miles all the way from modern-day Chile to western Mexico, according to new findings by MIT researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.****[/url]

****Details of how the ancient trading system worked more than 1,000 years ago were reconstructed largely through the efforts of former MIT undergraduate student Leslie Dewan, working with Professor of Archeology and Ancient Technology Dorothy Hosler, of the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE).****

*****The new work supports earlier evidence documented by Hosler that the two great centers of pre-European civilization in the Americas-the Andes region and Mesoamerica- had been in contact with each other and had longstanding trading relationships. *****

[mercurygirl]

Fascinating stuff. We don't know very much about how humans moved around prehistorically, but it's certain they did and quite well.

Fossil remains of humans found in Australia have been dated to around 40,000 years old. Since humans evolved, Australia has always been an island.
Mungo Man

[Eli]

Those guys must be the slow kids at MIT.