I dont understand how early hominids with stone tools could colonise the americas/australasia/pacific islands long before the white man met them. Humans originated in africa and there are so many land masses not connected to africa which have a 'native' human population. Surely they didn't sail the seven seas in wooden canoes?!
2007-11-24 11:26:45 · 17 answers · asked by Gabriel H 3 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Geography
Africa, Asia and Europe are all connected, as you know.
A few tens of thousands of years ago, the sea level was a bit lower than it is now. This meant that the Bering Strait - the narrow bit of sea between Siberia and Alaska - was actually land. So people could just walk over between Asia and North America.
The only major landmass that wasn't connected by land is Australia. However there is a series of islands between SE Asia and Australia, and it is theorised that early explorers could easily have "island-hopped" from one to the other using rafts or canoes. The islands are never more than a few miles apart, and most of the time the explorers wouldn't even have needed to travel out of sight of land.
The islands that are really isolated - New Zealand, Hawaii, etc - were not populated until relatively modern times.
2007-11-24 20:03:01 · answer #1 · answered by Daniel R 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Yes, they did.
Not in a round-the-world -boatrace sort of way, but over a period of hundreds, probably thousands of years hopping from island to island.
And current thinking was that the ancestors for all native American tribes crossed to the Americas through the Siberia-Alaska land or Ice bridge (during one of the ice ages, the last one was about 10,000 years ago which looks right) and then just got Jiggy with it. They can trace the genetic footprint all the way south to Peru. Two Continents and they didn't get their feet wet.
As for the Islands, why do you think these early explorers couldn't do what the Vikings did do? There isn't a huge technological gap between them, and the longest sea trip between Asia and Australia (without hitting some form of land) is only a couple of hundred miles.
PS SC2, you're talking about "Pangæa", the Supercontinent before Continental drift started to move that apart into separate continents... the thing is, that happened about 250 million years ago, and even early mankind evolved maybe 1 or 2 million years ago at the earliest.
The lands our immediate ancestors started walking on was not very different from the maps of today... Continental drift takes a long time!
2007-11-24 11:46:39 · answer #2 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
Can't believe how many Adam and Eve answers you are getting. All based on the biblical myth, of course. The evidence is pretty clear that humans originated in Africa and spread across the globe from there. There is some suggestion that apelike ancestors of humans spread from Asia to Africa. This would be ancestors of Orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans. Some would have stayed behind and were ancestors to the orangutans while the others moved back to Africa and were the ancestors of the other four great apes. This hypothesis hasn't been generally accepted (yet) in the scientific community, but we continue to learn new things as new fossils are found.
2016-04-05 07:19:52 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
They walked from Africa to Asia. The Suez Canal was not there until the 20th century.
They could walk into Europe. Europe, Africa and Asia is a single landmass.
They built boats and crossed vast distances. That is how they reached Australia.
2007-11-24 11:30:36 · answer #4 · answered by Phil McCracken 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Its hard to say when humans started to habitate the earth and how they colonised the continents, although one theory is that along time ago there was only one land mass called Pangaea this in time drifted apart making the continents we have today so perhaps they never had to cross any water, who knows
2007-11-24 11:42:38 · answer #5 · answered by Spooky Mouse 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
1
2017-02-19 16:15:53 · answer #6 · answered by ? 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
There was a time in world history that we have the glacier age. And majority of the earths surface was covered with ice.This ice bridges the distance, from north to south and east to west. Early people travel by feet passing tru the land bridges in search for food. Due to the change of climate the ice melt and became water. That made them difficult to travel back but instead, they have to adapt their new envioronment inorder to survive.
2007-11-24 11:55:07 · answer #7 · answered by anomdls2 1 · 0⤊ 1⤋
Walking
2007-11-24 11:38:49 · answer #8 · answered by rosie recipe 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
africa is connected to asia and europe so thats half the world colonised. then i guess the next big step was america when christopher columbus sailed the marie seleste??????? what wasnt exactly a raft.. although i cant explain natives in america and australia...
2007-11-24 11:36:00 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 2⤋
they walked.
on the days of yore, all the land we see now is just one big mass that has broken off into continents we now know.
while it was breaking of into different parts due to eathquakes and ocean-tides-what-have-you that is when the first humans settled into different areas.
this breaking off from the main took millions of years so technically each part of the globe then was connected through land bridges.
hope you got your answer.
2007-11-24 11:37:33 · answer #10 · answered by sc2zabala 3 · 1⤊ 1⤋