supplementary articles
THE CREATING OF A REVOLUTIONARY
WAY
OF LIFE INVOLVING BOATS
While an individual invention is easy, developing an new complete way of life is difficult
INTRODUCTION
Humans are by nature, like apes, land-oriented
peoples, so even though today we do not realize it, the first
endeavours to create a way of life in which one moved around the lands
in boats instead of walking, would have been revolutionary - as
revolutionary as the first peoples to entirely grow their own food, or
to move around the land on horseback.
The development of a new boat-oriented way of life
did not occur on whim. While humans have always had the ability to
invent ways of crossing water by floating watercraft, and bear the fear
of the action for a short time, to actually create an entire way of
life in which most former travel of food was replaced by travel on
water, was revolutionary. It would have taken many generations of trial
and error to figure it out. While chasing seals in water could draw
from a former life ambusing reindeer crossing water, most of it was
new. The irony of all first inventions is that once developed, the
final, refined, version is easily imitated, copied. The practice could
have spread into other peoples facing the same predicaments, or at
least hastened its development.
Today we are familiar, especially in North America,
a way of life involving automobiles. It too did not come about quickly.
The way of life actually developed over many centuries from the uses of
horse-drawn wagons and carriages. It created the template for a way of
life using horse power, which was then established when the concept of
the automobile was introduced.
Thus the development of a boat-oriented way of life
had two sides - the development of the ideal vehicle - the sleek dugout
canoe, and the development of the way of life in the real northern
environment. In this supplementary article we will look at both.
HOW AN IDEA EVOLVES INTO REALITY
Today we take the use of boats for granted.
Because today anyone can purchase a boat and go fishing,
there is a
common belief that boats and boat use is something that could easily
arise from simply concieving of it and trying it. For example,
some scholars have said the idea for a skin boat could come from
watching a wicker basket float on water. But such experiments and ideas
are what humans do all the time - they are just amusements or toys. Or
they could be ad hoc contrivances to solve a one-time problem. The idea
is never adopted into common practical uses because there is no real
long term necessity.or usefulness for it.
Indeed, humans have always been
able to
put baskets in water and watch them float. Children can even climb in
them and play games.
Another good example would be to
ride
on the back of a large animal. There is not doubt that early horse
hunters may have developed a sport of jumping on the back of the wild
horses and trying to see who could remain on the longest. But games,
amusements,.or sport
would not become
established in that society until this practice of riding on a horse's
back became useful in the
way of life in general.
Another example would be the discovery of
electricity. Apparently a battery had been invented in ancient times,
but it was used probably as a novelty of some kind. It was a toy. Who
back then
could have imagined that one day there would be a world society that
actually ran on electricity?
The reality is that an idea does not become
established in a society unless
it is truly necessary and economically viable. The invention of
boats
had to represent improvements for a society that offset the natural
reluctance of the human being to take to water.
The use of boats or
water craft like rafts were probably used by humans maybe back to ape
ancestors, since today we can see apes devising ways of crossing a
river on something serving as a raft. But these are one-time
solutions to challenges, and not something of continual necessity.
Indeed, the reindeer hunters from which the Maglemose and Kunda
cultures emerged had probably created ad hoc watercraft to ambush
reindeer crossing a river, the river slowing them down. The story of
the boat people is not the invention of the boat, just as horseback
riding is not the invention of a way of life using the horse for transportation, nor how
weeding around wild berry plants is farming. What we must see is
the practice becoming a central necessity in the way of life.
Unless
you find yourself living in swamps, a boat is just a novelty or an
occasional practical device. Unless you live in open steppes, horseback
riding is an occasional practice. Unless you live in a location where
wild food cannot grow, farming is an occasional practice too.
The revolution of the use of boats as a central part
of a way of life is something needing more recognition. It lead to
harvesting water animals, and most importantly to large scale trade.
There were water highways everywhere, and the invention of a
boat-oriented way of life lead to contact and trade over large regions,
and therefore boats were responsible for the creation of a European
civilizations that reached from one end of Europe to another, whereas
previous civilizations, like those of Asia Minor, were comparatively
small.
THE DIFFICULTY OF INNOVATION, EASE OF COPYING
At the origin of boats
you really needed a situation in which
humans had to deal with flooded lands all the time, generation after
generation. Beginning with the need to cross waters to get from one
island region to
another, soon they found they could just as well hunt water
animals and gather plants as well. This then promoted improvements to the
dugouts and the invention of new hunting practices that employed boats.
Once the
art and technology of using dugout canoes and the hunting in aquatic
environments had developed the boat actually provided the
unexpected benefit in allowing them to travel some five
times faster than even walking on clear solid ground. Suddenly a single
language and culture in boat-oriented peoples could cover a vast water
geography.
The degree to
which the boat people recieved benefits can be the equivalent of the
later advantages of farming. The mere act of trying to help wild plants
of animals flourish, lead to a way of life that allowed a high
concentration of usable food animals and plants in a small area, which
lead to population growth in farming peoples.
Today's culture of automobiles on
highways, is based on an older one of horsedrawn carriages on roads,
but both are ultimately based on the oldest tradition in transportation
- boats on rivers. Without the boat-oriented way of life, and the
results in shipping and transportation, Europe today would not be much
more advanced than North America in the
17th century before European colonization.
It all owes itself to the development of the dugout
canoe in the flooded lands south of the metling glaciers at about
12,000 years ago in what is now southern Scandinavia.
Starting new inventions and new ways of life
using them, is very
difficult - there have to be sustained environmental pressures, and
there has to
be a long evolution from crude actions to a refined way of life.
That could take many generations.
But once the way of life has matured
and proves to be successful then other peoples can quickly copy it. Not
only does the establishing of it validate it for others to copy, but
new users do not need to progress through a long evolution anymore. By
simply copying, they derive the benefits immediately.
This is an important point. Humans are social
creatures, who inherently want to be part of a larger social order, and
if they see other peoples doing something interesting they will copy
it. But if it does not exist yet, the environment has to practically
force humans to develop the adaptation! This is important
because, even if it took millenium to gradually evolve the
boat-oriented way of life, when other peoples saw that way of life,
they could easily adopt it or parts of it, if it was useful for them.
Hunting peoples, for example, adopted farming after
they saw it, but only to the extent that it was possible. A person in
the arctic may learn of farming, but not be able to make it practical.
The development of horseback riding too, may
have taken a hundred generations to develop into a central role in a
society, but once it was established all other peoples could adopt
it. But it had to begin in a slow way accompanied by sustained
pressure.
Such sociological insights suggest that it was not
necessary for either horseback riding ot a farming way of life to be
brought into continental Europe from elsewhere. All that was needed was
for a people living in an environment in which this innovation was
useful, to learn of it and copy it. That means continental Europe
did not need any great migrations from the east for the innovations of
farming or horse use to spread everywhere. A minority could invent it
and it would spread into the majority if it was practical.
A good example is the way in recent North America,
the Plains Natives for whom horseback riding was an obviously useful
innovation, saw Spaniards in the south riding horses, soon found
Spanish horses who had escaped into the wild, and in a few generations
the Plains Natives were riding horses througout the Plains.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE SLEEK, LIGHT, PRACTICAL EVERYDAY DUGOUT CANOE
The first watercraft designed for regular use 12,000 years ago were
probably logs with a cavity for a person in it, and from then on, the
buiders of them made the walls thinner and the shape more streamlined.
In the beginning the boat began as a simple raft of
logs, improvised when needed. But the new way of life needed a
reusable, long-life, canoe. It may have begun as a cavity in a log, but
then the cavity was made larger, the design more streamlined, and
eventually the walls thiner to make the boat easy to handle.
Archeologists have not found very many canoes
since
most have rotted away. But a few have been found from Britain to
the east Baltic - or parts of them - preserved in bogs. But,
archeologically speaking, the greatest testimony to the originating and
expanding of a dugout boat people are adzes. Stone adzes have been
found from Britain to the Urals, suggesting a successful culture
developed in the vicinity of Denmark (where archeologists found the
first evidence of it in the "Maglemose" culture, found in a Danish
bog). These stone adzes would not have been very useful to chop away
wood; however the technique was preserved by the Finno-Ugric Hanti
(Khanty, Ostyaks) It involves using hot coals to burn away the wood,
and using the adze to chop away coals in the direction the burning
should proceed. Where the coals are not chopped away, the burning does
not get oxygen and the fire is choked.
Unfortunately archeologists and other scholars have
failed to adequately appreciate what great development took place when
a prehistoric people developed a new way of life involving dugouts
boats/canoes. They assume that any people anywhere can decide to build
a boat and suddenly create a way of life involving them. Even our modern experience can tell this is
not true. Who today can build a sleek dugout without actually having
a master show us or at least a complete set of instructions.
Those who have attempted without instruction and from only the concept,
can only manage a crude trenched log.
But even before ANYONE had
created a dugout, how would an inventor even know what was needed? If
humans have never before glided in a water vehicle, how would they know
that this would be useful? How would they know that this new method of
getting around will give them greater success than the original method
of creating paths and walking? That is the reason the internalization
of a new innovation into a culture is a slow trial-and-error
proceedure. (But once perfected the innovation can be copied by
anyone!)
A good example today is the automobile. The automobile could not have
come into existence, had it not been for precedents in earlier vehicles
drawn by horses. The automobile simply replaced the horse with an
engine. This the automobile in fact took a couple thousand years
to develop, when we think of its beginnings with the pulling of ancient
wagons with horses.
Even though humans
were entertaining themselves by jumping on the backs of horses for
sport from the moment they investigated the animals, it probably took
1000 years for conditions to push societies to develop the horse into
the fabric of society. Similarly other beasts of burden like oxen, also
took some time to become adopted into practical uses. Ironically, North
America certainly had animals that could have been similarly
domesticated - bison domesticated to pull wagons, or the riding of a
large animal like a moose - but it never developed. And yet, within a
couple of generations after the Plains Indians saw the Spaniards riding
horses, they were suddenly riding horses, as already mentioned.
Another example is the developments leading to the
telephone. It begins with couriers carrying messages, evolves into a
postal system carrying letters, which then discovers sending messages
by telegraphy, which then develops into the telephone. It is also a
very long evolution, but once it is part of the way of life of a
people, it is easily adopted by other people. We need only note how
fast the cellphone has been established in the modern world, including
third world countries where the cellphone users do not have any of the
earlier traditions that developed it. You can find in a Brazilian
jungle a people who only a couple generations ago lived in the wild,
now having solar panels and satellite dishes and watching a flat screen
TV!
Thus, applying this to the
evolution of a boat-oriented way of life: obviously humans had always
been able to create boat-like toys from floating bowls in water, and
even creating huge boat-like bowls and having a child play around with
it in water games. Obviously too whenever ancient tribes found their
way blocked by a river or a lake, they were intelligent enough to put
together some sort of raft to cross it. Even apes can improvise a raft from some logs. The issue is not in human
ingenuity. The issue is in the development of an entire way of life
revolving around transportation and hunting using a boat, instead of
the traditional ways travelling on foot.
If it had never existed
before; if humans have previously only hunted and travelled on foot;
then doing these things with a boat required a major evolution, perhaps
as elaborate as our long evolution today towards the automobile,
starting with the horsedrawn wagon, nay-- starting with harnessing the
power of a horse!.
The development of a boat-using
way of life thus had to go through many trial and error developments,
and human need and circumstances judged which choices were better and
which were worse (Tribes that adopted the better ways were more
successful, had more children, and also found rival tribes
copying their methods. Evolution itself selected the good choices!)
THE NEED FOR PRECEDENTS
One interesting observation about
inventions that are not toys but become part of the way of life of a
human society, is that every new development needs to be founded on an
old one, because too dramatic a development throws the operation of
that way of life into chaos.. Early automobilies for example had to be
built on top of the existing institutions of the
horse-and-carriage, The first automobiles had to still look like
carriages, except powered by engines not horses. That would not disrupt
society's operation (other than putting liveries out of work, but then,
the liveries turned into automobile repair facilities.) It is clear
that change cannot be dramatic. If someone had produced an automobile
that looked like a modern automobile right away, the public would not
have been able to relate to it. But the "horseless carriage" was
wonderful. It was still the familiar carriage, but it did not need a
horse to pull it.
The evolution of the boat had to proceed in a
similar way. It had to slightly improve something already established.
In hunting the moose and other large animals, the
early hunters (about 10,000 years ago) would encounter rivers and
marshes, and had to improvise rafts to get across. Perhaps they
straddled a log and paddled across on it.
After a time, someone decided to paddle across while
trying to keep their feet out of the water. Why not make a cavity in
the log?
Once there was a cavity in the log, the hunter
gained the ability to go after water animals directly from the crude
boat. For example fishing or hunting wildfowl, not to mention
collecting edible water plants, was now easy.
The dugout canoe, thus fostered a change towards hunting
and collecting foods connected to the flooded lands - and if the lands
were mostly flooded, it would have been teeming with water plants and
animals! In turn, changes to the dugout boat, and its use,
altered the way of life as well.
Then the hole was made more comfortable, and larger,
to hold more than one man. Then someone discovered that making the
outside more streamlined allowed it to travel faster
Each change was then tested in actual
practice. The clans and tribes that had the better developments in both
the vehicle and its use, had more children than those who has made
poorer developments. Thus it was evolution itself that decided, from
greater success and population growth, that developments would
constantly move in the more beneficial directions.
Over many generations, the log turned into a dugout with a
streamlined shape and thin walls (to be light enought to carry). Such
sleek dugouts are still made and used by the Khanti of the Ob River in
Siberia, althought they can only make small single-man versions on
account there are no large trees in their northern environment.
The Khanti method of making the dugout is probably thousands of years
old. The method involved using fire to make the cavity. The stone adze
was not used to chop the wood, but to chop away coals in the direction
in which the maker wanted the fire to proceed. Fire is halted when
there is a buildup of coals. In the 1980's filmmaker Lennart Meri
documented the making of a dugout in a Khanti campsite on a branch of
the Ob River. The Khanti dugout, used by one man in the fashion of a
kayak, was limited in size by the limits in the size of trees in their
northern location.
The first dugouts, those
associated with the archeological "Maglemose" culture, were designed
for dealing with the marshy landscape from the region now the Jutland
Peninsula and southern Sweden, east along the south Baltic coast (the
Oder River basin) to the southeast Baltic. These people had no need nor
desire to venture out into the waves of the Baltic. Humans did not
develop in uncomfortable directions unless circumstances forced them,
or circumstances benefited them beyond their sense of discomfort.
How a new way of life with boats had to adapt to human nature and the environments
THE SOCIOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF BEING ABLE TO MOVE AROUND IN BOATS
An important and also unrecognized
aspect of the boat-peoples is that with boats, boat-using
hunter-fisher-gatherers could travel over five times faster and farther
than the earlier hunters that moved on foot over clear open land. That
means boat-using hunting-fishing-gathering territories could be over
five times larger than that of the earlier big animal hunters, like the
reindeer hunters. For example, if a reindeer hunter band covered a
territory 100km in diameter, the boat-users could cover a territory of
500km in diameter with the same effort . However, since boat-use was
determined by the
nature of the waterways, boat-people territories would be stretched in
various ways according to the configuration of water systems. . A linear territory could assume the form of travelling
1500km up and down a river, or along a coast. (For example, evidence of
rock carvings with moosehead skin boats suggests that there may have
been a tribe that migrated annually between wintering at Lake Onega and
summering in the islands off the coast of arctic Norway. Lake Onega
images of moose do not show antlers - proof that these people were not
there in summer and never experienced antlered moose (antlers are lost
in the fall and regrown in spring).
TerrItory is very important in the human
psyche, and it follows that if the range of tribes with boats was this
large, then in the early period of expansion of the boat peoples, it is
clear that breakaway bands and then tribes would have to travel a great
distance
to remove themselves from the territories claimed by the parent
band.
If families were having three children, then a breakway tribe would
form every 50 years or less, and move about 500km away. They water
geography from the Baltic to the Urals and beyond would have
boat-people within 1000 years. (The destination lands have to be
unoccupied, as mentioned above for that speed) The most recent example
of rapid
expansion of a boat-people is that of the Canadian arctic "Thule"
culture from Alaska to Greenland in only about 500 years.
Note that a group of men in dugouts could travel
from the Baltic to the Urals, via the Volga, within weeks, so we are
here speaking about boat peoples tribes actually inhabiting the the
region - which also depends on population growth.
As I mentioned earlier, the original
expansion (10,000 to 6000 BP) was unopposed. Towards Scandinavia, there
were virgin lands released from under the glaciers. Further east, there
would have been remnants of reindeer people, but they were in very poor
shape, with the warmed lands that no longer supported tundra reindeer.I
believe that the remnant pedstrian hunters - moose, elk, deer, an
individual woodland reindeer - would have quickly adopted the new
successful way of life.
But in terms of boat peoples, the marshes and rivers were
empty, and could be inhabited without opposition. As time went on, of
course, new waves of expansion occurred, and the new immigrants would
have to find territories in more marginal territories. When the climate
stopped warming, the whole post-glacial expansion would reach an
equilibrium, until human developments such as farming and trading.
When the virgin territories were inhabited, then if
population growth continued, there would be additional waves into the
same broad region, where newcomers could not take ownership of
territories already occupied. Newcomers would be directed to marginal
locations - branches of rivers not yet inhabited because they were
poorer in one way of another. Of course strong groups could try to take
over good territories and push the original inhabitants to marginal
locations. Formal political organization was also possible. This would
allow tribes to be larger. As time went on, adoption of framing
and settlements too, increased the population which a geographic region
could contain. However in this document we are interested in the
earliest period, before farming and before even professional trading.
(Basically before 5000 years ago)
Sociologically humans could be scattered in their
way of life, and that was the case. As the Algonquians of North America
showed, extended families roamed through their hunting-gathering
territories of usually branches of rivers; but social forces required
they make contact with other extended families, ideally in an annual
cycle, and the common practice was for exended families to congregated
for some weeks usually at the mouths of their river. That meeting
defined the tribe, and people of neighbouring tribes could visit too.
There was also the need to find mates. But the net result of gatherings
of extended families or even neighbouring tribes was that it created a
uniformity of culture, language, and worldview over an area as large as
the enormous area covered by boat-use. For example if the families of a
tribe travelled a branch of a river that was roughly 100 km wide, then
the size of the river basin could be some 500 km wide. If there was
another water system on each side, that would create a region of
neighbouring tribes sharing the same language and culture about 1000 km
in width. It follows that you would not see a noticable dialectic
change in culture or language until you travelled more than 1000 km. We
don't have to guess such truths. This was the case with the Algonquian
birch-bark-canoe peoples across the east half of what is now Canada,
where - as we will discuss further below - there were only about 3-4
dialectic regions across this entire region (half the width of Canada)
In the case of the Algonquians, and in the case of the early
northwest Eurasian boat peoples, the social and political structure was
essentially structured by the water geography. The heirarchy of
families, tribes, multitribal confederations, peoples. was determined
by nature - based on the fact that boat peoples lived on, and were
confined by, their water systems.
Boat peoples may have been the earliest peoples to
be able to move fast and far on water, the earliest to access formerly
inaccessible aquatic plants and animals, and the earliest to form large
scale social and political structures simply from paralleliing the
heirarchical structure of the water geography itself.
Because today few people grasp the revolutionary developments
that arose from simply the innovation of travelling in boats instead of
walking, we will look at it in some detail
author: A.Paabo, Box 478,
Apsley, Ont., Canada
2018 (c) A. Pääbo.
