WISDOM OF THE OCEAN

Abstract

The discovery of distinctive ‘Lapita’ pottery fragments from this period finally provided researchers with a trail to follow. What that trail revealed was that the migration across the South Pacific didn’t just happen by accident or chance. Indeed, by about 1100BCE it seems that ocean navigation had reached a level of sophistication that allowed for return voyages over many hundreds of nautical miles. How did this navigational knowledge system develop and spread so quickly? Was there some kind of nonlinear process involved that enabled the spread of this knowledge over such vast distances? Perhaps the knowledge of how to navigate the ocean was already there, in the ocean itself. Many other beings: whales, turtles, sharks, tuna, migrate thousands of miles with pinpoint accuracy and have for millions of years.