The historical assault on our African influences on the development and uses of sail power can be focussed right here. This is the time of the first migrations out of the continent that was named Africa. The term itself has its earliest European recorded meaning as Egyptian for Motherland. I never learned that in school. I thought the Greeks termed the continent something to do with hot land.The first sailors, who dared to break land based traditions and pushed off from the Horn of Africa and went over to what is now Yemen, probably did not call where they left Africa.

 

Our African histories are so invisible with jumps from the first humanoid remans found to the all of a sudden we are in Egypt, and then we are in Bethlehem, and then we are in Greece, Rome, Spain, Morocco, France, England, the Americas. Wait, what was Africa doing during all these skips in time and how did Africans move their people around this blue planet to get to those places? We have European recorded histories of conquests on the continent of Africa that seemed to have just popped up thousands of years after those first sailors shoved off but how were those cultures developed?  I am just sticking to our invisible maritime history and heritage that has enough evidence to be picked up and placed in the puzzle even if it is only through speculation at this point in time.

 

So, what was the route taken by those sailors and on what type of vessel did they adventure? I use the term adventure because going out into the unknown is an adventure by definition. Let’s take my little group who has found their way to a delta region and sees this great expanse of water out past the delta. It must have been one of the greatest mysteries and probably led to a lot of campfire tales that included monsters of the deep as well as losing the biggest fish ever known. A tribe of fishermen developed who were the supreme adventurers who came back from space with the greatest tales and fish, sometimes including the biggest fish ever known.

 

Did their own tales of adventure lure them out further and further over time until they actually reached a land where there wasn’t land before? Did they find their ways back with stories of other types of food sources and/or fewer rules to be governed by?

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The types of hulls might have developed in search of those tales of lands where there were none before. Planks sinewed by stronger fibres together and pitch caulking to keep the vessels dryer. The sails also made by stronger and lighter fibres woven tightly hold more wind and not break apart or be too uncontrollable. The first cottons and ropes and uses of the sun for navigation all developing over centuries to get to the bigger fish, or to get to the other land by a sometimes relaxing ride over water.

 

I am excluding the ride North along the Nile but including the tributaries of that great river that led to the sea. The Nile has its own hidden normal folk histories to be uncovered but the people who did the development of sail power were not the pharaohs who come much later historically but the people who looked for food and eventually for trade. The people who developed sail power moved along the coasts, stopping and forming tribal sites and moving from them to form other tribal places.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, they crossed over from the indent of the Horn over to the land they sometimes could see that we now call Yemen. They followed that coast of Yemen not by foot but by the same method they used to move along the coast of Africa. They sailed and stopped, sailed and stopped. DNA proved this took place around 70,000 years ago but usually the historians and anthropologists have the people walking. If you had the capability to sail across the less than twenty miles from Africa to Yemen why would you trudge along on foot when you could go faster and more comfortably aboard a boat?

 

When they arrived at the point where the land stopped them moving East they crossed into what we now call India. Now, they seemed to go South, again not heading inland but their left behind DNA has them coasting again for a long distance, then breaking off to go inland and North to populate what became the Middle East and Europe. Other groups continued South until the came to another lands ending and somehow walked across the water to Sri Lanka where they developed sailing vessels that looked exactly like the ones they had developed in Africa. Or, they sailed across.

 

Another grouping turned with the Eastern Coast of India and coasted along to the Laotian peninsula. And, again a break away group moved inland to populate the Far East while the coastal grouping moved South and populated Australia and the South Pacific islands. We have moved along to around 60,000 years ago with our DNA samplings but aboard sailing vessels in place of footing it. I am sure that humankind were helped by their innovativeness to eventually harness animals to carry their loads along the shorelines as well as using vessels to paddle, row and sail but the waterborne history is all but excluded as a real ingredient to our journey along the shores and into the  Pacific. Why?