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History of Technology 2: Early Boats 25 Views


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Description:

Early boats may have been leaky and impossible to steer, but they sure beat walking. Well...until they got caught in a surprise waterfall. No one likes a surprise waterfall.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

Walking is exhausting seriously come find us after a day at the [Footage of people walking around a city]

00:09

theme park our dogs are barking, and that's not just a modern problem at some

00:14

point our ancestors got tired of walking too. No word on whether or not it passes

00:18

in a theme park. Maybe they noticed logs floating down the river and were like

00:23

"hey I can do that" well however it happened about 50,000 years ago people [Prehistoric man watches log float down a river]

00:27

around the world started inventing ways to move on the water. The very first boats

00:32

were probably rafts of logs lashed together with vines, bark or leather.

00:36

Our buddy Oog, the caveman probably saw some logs going on down the river and

00:42

got the bright idea to tie them all together and just sit on them. And sure they

00:46

couldn't be steered and they probably leaked a little and they weren't great in the [Oog sat on a leaking raft]

00:50

rapids. But coasting down a river sure had to beat walking a few hundred

00:54

miles, until the waterfall came.. You alright there Oog? We're sure he's fine ... The next and

01:00

probably most celebrated boat was the dugout canoe. Well to make one of these we

01:05

started with a single large tree trunk then we used small controlled fires to

01:10

burn out the center of the log, finally we scrape away the charred bits with an Adze [Prehistoric man setting a log on fire]

01:14

which is just a sharp rock on a stick.. We end up with a narrow hollowed-out boat

01:20

that is maneuverable and a water tight and with such a successful design that

01:25

it was built by human being all over the world for literally thousands of years.

01:29

All the cool kids had one, and if you still had a bunch of blogs tied together

01:33

well then you were so prehistoric even the dinosaurs were laughing at you. [People in boats overtake Oog on a raft]

01:37

And sure canoes took skill and tools to make, but they weren't super rare way

01:42

back in ancient times. Archaeologists have found dugout canoes in both the

01:47

Netherlands and in Nigeria. At 8,000 years old they're the oldest canoes on record.

01:52

This means different groups of people separately came up with the same kind of

01:56

canoes which just goes show you, there are no new ideas. About 5,000 years ago [Two people in the same canoe labelled Dutch and Nigerian]

02:01

after the canoe was invented a new seafaring innovation appeared. With this

02:05

new technology Europeans would explore the known world, Indians would build vast

02:10

trading empires and Africans would head out for the new world. Well what was this

02:15

magical technology mm-hmm the sail. Oh for now don't run away with the idea

02:20

that sales immediately made the canoe and paddle unimportant, no way. Well sails

02:25

in the ancient world weren't all that great, in the beginning they were about [Boat with a sail sinks]

02:28

as effective as tying a sheet to a stick and putting it in our canoe. Well human

02:32

muscle power was still the name of the game for a long time. Even really clever

02:37

and advanced ships like Greek galleys and Viking Drakkars had to be rode along by

02:42

rows of sweaty dudes, and no deodorant had not been invented yet. It would have made those [Vikings in a Drakkar]

02:48

voyages way better for everyone involved. [Man smells his armpit and collapses]

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