Free Republic

NEW YORK - A 41-foot raft made of reeds and wooden planks set out Wednesday on voyage from New York to Spain, a daring and perhaps foolhardy attempt to prove people in the Stone Age could have crossed the Atlantic. The fragile-looking craft was towed down the harbor past the Statue of Liberty, to be cut loose once it passed into the open sea. At the helm was Dominique Gorlitz, 41, a German botanist and ex-teacher who has spent years preparing for the expedition. "We are trying to retrace the ancient waterways to prove that prehistoric people crossed the ocean...

Ancient vessel retraces voyages of the past By Stefanos Evripidou IT LOOKS like a tree house stuck on a bamboo banana. In reality it's the incarnation of a pre-Pharaonic reed boat, designed and built to unravel the mysteries of prehistoric navigation. The Abora II drifted in to Larnaca marina yesterday. Weighing in at six- tonnes, the vessel is a totra-reed boat. It is 11.5 metres long, 3.5 metres wide and 1.5 metres deep. The man responsible for building the huge boat is Dominique Goerlitz, a biology teacher at a school in Germany. As a student, Goerlitz was fascinated by the...