NEW: SEEMING CONFIRMATION OF THIS BOAT PEOPLE THEORY IN POPULATION GENETICS STUDIES - SEE A.PÄÄBO INTERPRETATIONS OF "Signature of recent historical events in the European Y-chromosomal STR haplotype distribution" by Lutz Roewer, Peter J.P Croucher, et al. , 2005
A PROJECT OF ANDRES PÄÄBO
EXPLORING AND HIGHLIGHTING THE UNTOLD EARLY STORY OF NORTHERN PEOPLES WITH A WAY OF LIFE ON WATER
(this site is written, edited and maintained by Andres Pääbo)
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
This web project began when I saw images of the amazing rock carvings found at both Lake Onega and Alta Norway made, they say, perhaps more than 6000years ago. They show images of people in small skin boats with animal heads (like the three person moosehead boat) and large skin boats that have the head on the prow but are now made from many skins. The second illustration above is from the Lake Onega carvings, In addition carvings there and elsewhere will show a person standing all alone in what is obviously a dugout canoe such as still made sometimes by traditional Khanty on the Ob River. Obviously trees in the arctic were small and a one man dugout was all that could be managed. If they wished to harvest the ocean they had to invent a skin boat and I think that the small three man moosehead boats were an actualy moose, hollowed out and smoke-dried till as hard as dried meat or skin. These carvings demonstrated a link between Lake Onega and arctic Norway - clearly these boat people travelled considerably. The fact that White Sea carvings show the large moosehead boat catching a whale, suggest that the culture began in the south where there were moose, and before that further south where the Kunda Culture was - a Maglemose descended culture that harvested large mammals in the Baltic Sea. I became interested in the progress of these peoples - to the White Sea, over top, and also probably accessing arctic Norway from the interior - coming up the rivers from the Gulf of Bothnia. Following them, I found myself quickly in the Canadian arctic where the Inuit (Eskimos) have the large umiak skin boats, The small one man dugour evidently became the kayak. Traditional umiaks had walrus heads on the prow - reflecting a tradition of honouring the animal from whom the skin was taken. My journey also led me south, into the northern British Isles, where the skin boat called curragh was found - with an oxhead on the prow, as late as the 17th century. Did these people go further south? Perhaps they did. Perhaps they became the source of Atlantian legends. Perhaps from them developed the people who made megalithic constructions up and down the Atlantic coast.While one journey led me to follow intrepid skin boat people to North America and to the Pacific (perhaps by going the other way over Siberia), another journey made me wonder about the impacts of these people on the European civilization., Surely people with boats would be curious to ride the waters down the Dneiper, Volga, Vistula, Oder, Rhine, Rhone, Danube...Finding sedentary civilizations down there, they would have traded and some would have continued to do so, becoming professional traders. Some would have stayed and become part of the trading world down there - and that led me to wonder about the many instances of the name VENETI in the ancient writings. The words by Finnic language seemed to be plural of boat, or 'something pertaining to water' and could interpret easily as 'boat people' or 'people of watercrafts' or something similar. But scholars were not thinking in terms of traders at all. The Veneti were a mystery. The Adriatic Veneti had left behind inscriptions of their language. Maybe they were a Finnic language indicative or a northern origin? I then noticed that the Adriatic Veneti were at the southern terminus of two major trade routes carrying amber from the north. That provided a direct link. If amber came down for a millenium, the language in the south would have been kept in line with that in the north, and not diverge as fast as if there was no connection. The genetics of the peoples at the south really did not matter anymore. The language was a trade language, a lingua franca. Was the early trade language of the tradeways of early Europe of a Finnic character. It might be, if the traders were derived from the north - those notherners were preadapted to long journeys on rivers in boats. Thus I became sidetracked by these questions and that led me to interpret the Veneti inscriptions and document it in a book. What I have discovered and present has made these articles very heavily visited, and scholars already considering oceanic crossings to North America have sent supportive emails. Andres Pääbo (rev. Nov 09)