The theory is that when the Norse made permanent contact with the Sa'ami in the 8th Century, it was more cooperative than some want to believe. The Sa'ami had the boat design; the Norse had the larger trees and the well muscled men; and together they went forth to subdue the world ~ and did a fair to middlin' job of it considering how few of them there were.
BAG LIMIT MET ~ Sicily, France, Brittain, Ireland, Scotland..... all within a few centuries.
think we could even add in the entire empire Pepin ruled. He was pretty obviously of small Sa'ami-lie stature!
These engravings are several thousand years older than these guys are letting on. The boat thing is probably the cause. 5,000 years takes you back to the foundations of Egypt and Sumer and they had boats. A more realistic date of 7,500 takes you back before those sources and gives us an idea that stone age folks living in Arctic regions had boats ~ so why not their stone age cousins living in tropical paradises? Were they perhaps too stupid to build them?
If they were clinker built and 7500 years old that would imply that boats of some sort pre-existed these by quite a long time. Clinker built boats are something that would have taken a long time to evolve. If we allow several thousand years to go from a log or a skin raft to such a craft then we have to backtrack the receding ice sheets to find where suitable trees were. Perhaps back to sw France, nw Spain, i.e. Solutrean country?