Rowing from Taiwan to Japan was possible 30,000 years ago, says team

Japan Times

3 days ago

A Japanese team has concluded that it was possible to travel from Taiwan to Japan's westernmost island of Yonaguni in a dugout canoe 30,000 years ago.
The voyage in a log boat, with no sails, was possible if all the rowers were highly skilled and adjusted their course with the fast Kuroshio current in mind, the team said.
The team's findings resulted from a project by Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science to recreate how Japanese ancestors traveled from mainland China to present-day Taiwan, which was connected by land at the time, and then sailed to Yonaguni, east of Taiwan.
The findings were included in two papers published in U.S. journal Science Advances on Wednesday.
"You can see Yonaguni from some of the high peaks in Taiwan, but you don't arrive by chance (at Yonaguni) just by drifting," said Yosuke Kaifu, the team's leader and professor at the University of Tokyo.
"We surmise that our ancestors picked a date to start the voyage based on the seasonal, weather and sea conditions, and rowed out to sea in a group of men and women with the intention of settling down (in the new location)," he said.
The voyage was re-enacted in 2019, involving four men and one woman rowing a 7.5-meter-long dugout canoe.
The group left the eastern shore of Taiwan on the afternoon of July 7, 2019, and arrived at Yonaguni in Okinawa Prefecture 45 hours later despite being swept away by the ocean current at times.
The oldest archeological sites in Okinawa and the neighboring Amami island region of Kagoshima Prefecture date back 27,500-35,000 years.
As boats used back then have not survived to this day, the research team initially created a boat made from reeds and a bamboo raft.
It found, however, that such boats were too slow.
Although a dugout canoe would have been difficult to build using stone axes, the team concluded that this was the only option, as no other boat possible back then could reach a speed allowing the crossing of the Kuroshio current.
An ocean current simulation by researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC, and Ehime University has shown that sea levels at the time were lower than now. While faster back then, the Kuroshio current flowed closer to Yonaguni.
The team selected a southern point in eastern Taiwan to set off on its voyage, but it found that a point some 100 kilometers north of the point of departure was a better option.