[Grampa Dave]

#1> Waterborne ships and the navigational skills to go to where you wanted go, and the ability to come home to your home port.

Surviving clay tablets and containers record the use of waterborne vessels as early as 4000 BCE.

Boats are still vital aids to movement, even those little changed in form during that 6,000-year history. The very fact that boats may be quite easily identified in illustrations of great antiquity shows how slow and continuous had been this evolution until just 150 years ago. And though that was the time when steam propulsion became predominant, it never was anywhere universal in local transport.

Because some solutions to the problem of providing water transport were eminently successful and efficient several millennia ago, there are a number of boats still in use whose origins are lost in prehistory.

The above enabled us to be here today and have the rest of the list.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

Accurate timepieces helped immensely in making seaborne travel more accurate and effective.

They even had a massive contest to encourage inventors to improve the accuracy of timepieces.

[Bikkuri]

"BCE"

I stopped watching shows because they were using BCE instead of BC.. :P

[PIF]

Waterborne ships and the navigational skills to go to where you wanted go, and the ability to come home to your home port.

—
Even the Old Kingdom Egyptians had that.

[Fiji Hill]

Surviving clay tablets and containers record the use of waterborne vessels as early as 4000 BCE BC.

FIFY