Posted on 06/22/2002 4:13:15 PM PDT by vannrox
By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News
If the assessment of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists is correct, the slabs, found covered on one side with barnacles and warehoused in a stone building at a site called As-Sabiyah, would push back the date for the oldest known boat by more than 2,000 years.
According to an upcoming paper in the Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies and a paper published in the June 7 issue of the journal Science, the current oldest boat record-holder is a vessel found in an Egyptian tomb dating to 3,000 B.C. Evidence for log canoes, thought to be more like rafts than boats, goes back much further, to 8,000 B.C. The age of the entire As-Sabiyah site, including the boat remains, has been carbon-14 dated to 5,511-5,324 B.C.
Robert Carter, an archaeologist at University College London and the expedition's field director, believes that the slabs belonged to a boat because they have reed impressions on one side and barnacles on the other.
Carter said bitumen, which is still crushed with fish oil and coral and used today by some Middle Eastern boat builders, likely formed a waterproof seal around vessels constructed out of reed bundles tied together with ropes and string.
He also believes that the bitumen-covered reed boats were used to carry people and goods between Mesopotamia, As-Sabiyah (which he thinks was then a peninsula within the Tigris-Euphrates River area), and the Central Gulf region.
If the theory is correct, it could explain why ancient Mesopotamian pottery often turns up many miles to the south on the Persian Gulf's western shores, according to the Science report.
"We do not know the race of the people trading at As-Sabiyah," Carter told Discovery News. "It is (safe) to say that people from the Arabian Peninsula were involved, along with people from Mesopotamia."
Carter is more confident about what goods were traded, based on finds at the site. These included pierced pearls likely used for jewelry, pottery, shells, spindle whorls probably used to spin wool, bead necklaces, mother of pearl buttons, and flint and obsidian stones. He believes that livestock and fish also were traded.
Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, professor of archaeology at Harvard University, questions whether the As-Sabiyah boat was used for trade, due to its apparently small size, and suggests that it was just a fishing boat for locals. He also hints that remains of even older vessels may be found in future due to evidence for ancient boating, such as clay boat models.
Lamberg-Karlovsky said, "Although the Kuwaiti find might be the earliest evidence for a boat, it is very important to point out that people were seafaring far earlier than this."
Them barnacles are some thorn in the side of us boat owners.
What a maroon that french fry turned out to be.
This was before the invention of water, so the best they could do was float it on sand.
Bump to you blam.
The inventor was Ishkabible I in 7504 BC.
Fire was invented by Bug IV during the Charcoal Age, approximately 9500 BC... hence the term “fire-bug”.
Stay Safe
Look how far we have advanced, now days, we use duct tape and chewing gum.
"So what's the theory as to why it's out in the desert?"
I don't think Noah built the first boat ever. I think there were boats on bodies of water, whether ocean, lake or pond.
The fragment found in the Kuwaiti desert means the same thing as oceanic fossils showing up on mile-high mountains ... a universal flood.
As for fossils on mountains, they are there because of geologic uplift, as can be seen by the sharp angle of the bands of fossilized sea bed. Clearly, when the bands were made, the area was flat seafloor, not mountainous, and the layers were made over a very long time period before the uplift began. The fossil sea critters now seen in mountain rock are of course far older than the boat in any case. Wrong time period to be concurrent with the boat, unless you're thinking multiple floods.
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