“Also, boats - multi-man boats. Is it too much reading into it that they had figureheads of some sort? This would suggest wooden boats with keel and planks, rather than skin boats.”
Dale Drinnon (see his excellent blog at frontiersofanthropology.blogspot.com ) claims that the first such boats were just moose hides stretched over a wooden frame, with the moose heads left on; and that the custom of having a carved head at the prow descends from this.
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?
KLINKERBUILT
Interesting. I'll look into that.