How the fuck did they do it

Early agricultural people and hunter-gatherers were no less intelligent then we are today. Don't understimate human ingenuity.

>They were savages

Wrong, they practiced agriculture and were thus barbarians, not savages.

>can build a fancy giant canoe
>can't build a tank (aka, a box)

Balls the size of coconuts, that's how.

Apparently they had a bunch of sailing techniques in the form of song, so they probably disney'd their way to new islands

why did this make me laugh so hard

>le brown people are stoopid and can't do things I don't think they can do

i don't speak yellow

Well too bad to be you.
This video is exactly about a bunch of Polynesians tried to recreate or experiment how did their ancestors "do it", how did (((they))) travel from south China to the islands they live now. They actually do believe their ancestors cam form China.

*came

What the fuck are you trying to convey?

I'm telling you this video is about the question OP asked, "how the fuck did they do it"?

Turns out they actually can do it without any advanced technology, purely by simple sailing boat and primitive navigation. And they think they originated from Southeast China. Simple enough?

They navigated using the stars and ocean currents and found land based on patterns in the waves and observing migrating birds.

They followed the birds, the far off islands some ballsy crew kept following the birds longer than usual and ended up on Easter island.

Imagine the amount of people that get nowhere and died a horrible death

What nice summation of all of human history and its various endeavours

hang yourself

>can't make a barrel
how stupid do you think they were?

Only two cultures ever developed blue water navigation. Europeans and Polynesians.

So where is this map coming from?

Europeans.

Except east africans, arabs, indians, indonesians, chinese, and japanese

40 years after they first landed in the Caribbean?
300 years before they discovered Antarctica?

The others were able to sail along the coasts, with only a few blue water routes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Australis

>Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) is a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. The existence of Terra Australis was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south.[1] This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.[2]

If it's accurate, then it may be from a compilation of rumored voyages and discoveries. We know that Europeans had the ships to make those kind of discoveries from the start of the C14th, and we know that coastal navigation is sufficient to map most of what is shown.

I've seen this before, I didn't recognize it at first. If non- Europeans and non-Polynesians did develop blue water navigation they abandoned it pretty quickly.

They also made charts showing sea currents and islands out of sticks.

If you think the explanation is that it's "hypothetical" and similarities are purely "coincidental", by all means, go for it.
The other hypothesis would be that someone made the journeys and brought back usable charts.

There are several maps that show lands that the makers should not have been able to know. The Finaeus map showing the most obvious dissonance. They are supposedly sources from older maps that survived from antiquity.

Now in case that explanation is valid, who made it? And when?

That map is clearly European

the sea fears the polynesian

>If you think the explanation is that it's "hypothetical" and similarities are purely "coincidental", by all means, go for it.
Are you serious?

There have been dozens of depictions of Terra Australis, each having its own dumb, blobby shape. Naturally some of them will vaguely line up with the actual Antarctica, especially if you cheat and rotate them freely rather than having their prime meridians line up (as depicted in ).

Natural result of cultural evolution.
If you live on a bunch of small islands, and need boats to voyage between them, then obviously you're gonna have a culture pretty intertwined with maritime technology.
Don't underestimate the collective autism of humanity.

You think some non-Europeans circumnavigated Antarctica and then told the Europeans about it but without making maps themselves. Are you fucking insane?

Polynesian magic. They were able to read if an island is nearby by reading the waves of the sea.

So who were the sea people and why are you sure that they could not have mastered navigating the Atlantic, just as one possible candidate.
If someone had them that far back, all the cultures around the region would keep copying that map until it turn up at the greeks.
Why shouldn't some bronze age civilization have been successful at building blue water ships.
They made fucking pyramids at the same time.

>There have been dozens of depictions of Terra Australis
Just proofs that the idea of land at that place was pretty popular at that time
Of cause it looks different from mapmaker to mapmaker depending on skill an source material.
And if you gather all kinds of old maps and try to combine then into a new one, you could be excused for rotating a continent you know nothing about by 25°

Pic related is the nautical technology of ancient egypt.
Look at that thing and tell me it was impossible for cultures at that time to explore the atlantic.

For comparison the thing that carried Hayerdahl 4300nm across the pacific.

It is. But the guy who made it based it on older maps that wasn't necessarily European.

Possible yes, but they had no incentive to explore. Egyptians didn't even bother to try and find out where the Nile springs, let alone exploring the Atlantic.

>no incentive to explore
finding out what is behind the next mountains, desert, woods or waters was an incentive that already brought Homo erectus all the way to east asia.
Why would you think the urge to find out what is behind the next horizon was missing in bronze age cultures?
>Egyptians didn't even bother
maybe, maybe not. If they didn't it doesn't mean nobody else bothered.
The ship shows what tools they had.
I argue it is more likely that some used them to their full extend.

Again, think about the sea people capable of showing up suddenly all around the Mediterranean in big enough numbers to devastate kingdomes.

The furthest Bronze age Egyptians went was Ethipia/Somalia known to them as Punt, they went there a few times and theyd escribed it as some kind of great voyage

me too

they brought enough people to eat of course

user, you're comparing migration to exploration. Only very, very recently did anyone explore for the sake of exploration. For the vast majority of human history, exploration was done almost exclusively with profit in mind. Hell, even the age of exploration was kicked off with that, and it wasn't until the 1800s that the focus became more on mapping everything rather than finding new profitable routes and regions.

So the question is "who would have had the motive to do so?"

The European age of exploration was kicked off by the spice routes through the Middle East being closed. A wave of colonization and exploration of the Mediterranean was started by the Phoenicians in reaction to demands for tribute from Assyria. China sent out huge treasure fleets across the known world several times in the early Ming period. But for all of these, they had some aims that were far from just exploring.

The aim of the Phoenicians was to find valuable trade routes throughout the Mediterranean, and thus their colonies were focused on that - their most distant colony was Cadiz in southern Spain. There's claims they explored northern Europe and as far south as Cameroon, but realistically that's not too likely given that there wasn't anything much past Cadiz that would be worth their while.

The Chinese were looking for tribute and submission, and thus were firmly focused on only the known world. They made it as far south as Sofala in Mozambique, but, despite having more than enough maritime skill to reach Australia, they had no need to go that way due to the nature of their mission.

So you have to look for more than just possibility. You need a motive too.

>how the fuck did they do it
They got lucky.

You never hear about the thousands of them who didn't make it.

Well, there certainly was indirect trade between Cornwall and Phoenician colonies going on, there's no mystery, recently they've found this:
>A 2,300-year-old coin found after flooding along the River Avon near Bath has revealed details of early maritime activity up the Bristol Channel.
The 20mm coin was spotted in receding floodwaters in 2012, but the owner kept the details private until now.
It has been verified by the British Museum and is understood to be a Carthaginian coin, minted around Sardinia in 300-264 BC.

>Several similar examples have been recorded but only from the coastline.
On one side of the coin is an image of Tanit - a Punic and Phoenician goddess - and on the reverse is a horse's head.
Its owner wishes to remain anonymous but has allowed it to be included in a history project in Saltford, where the coin was found.

Even way before the 3rd century bc there were already trade routes linking the British isles, that connected them to the central Mediterranean (Sardinia, Italy), through the Iberian peninsula, in fact around 1100-950 bc, before the Phoenicians arrived in those places, the same type of swords was adopted by the locals from Ireland to the Central Mediterranean, including Iberians.

What Phoenicians did was mostly used trade routes already used by the locals, and of course with their arrival trade increased along those commercial routes, as suggested by archaeologists like this guy: youtube.com/watch?v=tael1JC2X_U

The idea that Phoenicians and locals from the Phoenician colonies reached Cornwall isn't too far fetched, considering the many Phoenician colonies along the Atlantic coast (Huelva, Gadir) and considering Phoenicians had some small emporiums in Portugal too, from there it would have been a few days of travel, and with their ships they could've made it.

>we don't know their motive, therefore they didn't do it
Finding trade routes and exotic goods, expanding influence, seek knowledge, thinking you have to fulfil a divine mission or just plain old curiosity
Also migration and exploration go hand in hand. You will be reluctant to go into the unknown, but when someone already was there, tells you about all the amazing empty land full of food and knows the way, you go for it.

We know next to nothing about many bronze age cultures and there are so many possible motives for them to try long sea journeys

How long are we talking?

For example if you know the african coast and decide to catch the trade winds west, you'll be at the east coast of south america or the eastern caribbean in 4-8 weeks
It's really mostly a thing of having the balls to do it
Even reed boats can make that journey

Again, that's not how migrations and exploration works. People don't just decide that they want to go and explore for the sake of exploration.

Ancient trade routes evolved out of short-range contacts. The kind of trade routes you see during the era of exploration are far different from even those of the medieval era. So any exploration for trade in pre-modern times is going to follow existing routes.

Migrations may have an aspect of exploration to them too, but again, they're not just sailing off into the sea - they're going towards whatever looks to be the most promising location. In the case of late Roman Europe, that meant a shift towards the more economically developed West.

You're trying to apply modern ideals and ways of thinking to ancient peoples that had a very different outlook on things. You can claim that it was possible all you want, but without any evidence of any voyages and no realistic motives, you're effectively spouting 1421-tier bullshit.

Zheng He traversed the width of the Indian Ocean when he departed from Calicut to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and back.

One single vessel finding it's way over the atlantic and making it back is enough to motivate exploration.

Some berber already made it until the Canaries and established populations there. So people were sailing these currents.

The whole mediterranean was filled with people obsessed with gaining knowledge, perfecting architecture, industry, astronomy, medicine, agriculture, naval tech etc. etc.

You think in a culture like that, not one single sailor had the ambition to extend the knowledge about the seas?

Exploration is not a medieval empire thing, it's basic human psychology, no matter at which era.

And you will naturally have little evidence about that after the bronze age collapse.
You may would have been lucky until greek times if you found the right pergament in egypt.
After the ancient egyptian cult died and the library burnt down, much off the knowledge about the bronze age would have disappeared.
If copys of charts survived into medieval times, for example through the greeks, that could have been part of source material of a map like I remind you that we have still no idea who the sea people were, who had obviously the naval power & numbers to raid the whole mediterranean
I have no proofs for all that, but there is quite a few things pointing in this direction and I find it more reasonable than the notion that in thousands and thousands of years these high cultures ignored the atlantic.

>we have still no idea who the sea people were
Except we've got a fairly good idea of who they were. It's a "mystery" in the same way the origins of the Slavs is - we've got a fairly good idea of what happened, just not the exact details because of a lack of written sources.

>there is quite a few things pointing in this direction
There isn't. Maps like the one you're referencing tended to fill in unknown areas, and southern continents were common because of the belief that land in the northern hemisphere had to be "balanced" by land in the south.

Otherwise, there's no evidence for what you're suggesting. You're spouting the same kind of retarded what-ifs that the Atlantis faggots love so much.

Trade was going on through the Atlantic coasts of Iberia to Italy during the late bronze age, but that was for good reasons, Iberia was rich in tin which was needed for bronze.

>we've got a fairly good idea of who they were
where did they settle and how far did they journey?

>there's no evidence for what you're suggesting
Blue water navigation with primitive technology done by other cultures (polynesians), virtually all land at some point discovered by primitive sailors, megalithic architecture and pyramids on both sides of the atlantic, Olmec heads, highly developed astronomy, Ramses II getting high on tabacco and coca, native american mythology talking about "gods" that came over the water and thought them how to do stuff.

>where did they settle and how far did they journey?
Hard to say for all of them because they appear to have come from multiple sources. They came from the Western Med, and they had cultural similarities to the Sardinians and Greeks of the time. Some groups settled in the Levant, others in Anatolia. Most of the details are still blurry thanks to the whole collapse of civilization thing, but it's far from a complete mystery anymore.

>muh polynesians
Had thousands of years of maritime tradition and the closest thing to your bullshit exploration theory of anyone. And even they had very real reasons for migrations - things like populations outgrowing local islands. And no, not all land was discovered by primitive sailors. New Zealand, for example, was only reached by the Polynesians 700 years ago.

>megalithic architecture and pyramids on both sides of the atlantic
Congratulations, you've discovered convergent evolution. Turns out stacking rocks is a popular way to build things. Same for astronomy. Turns out that without light pollution and no electricity, people tend to start to notice patterns after millennia of looking at the stars.

>Ramses II getting high on tabacco and coca
Ah yeah just like how they had lightbulbs and airplanes too, right?

>native american mythology talking about "gods" that came over the water and thought them how to do stuff.
Yes, just like how Prometheus clearly was an alien descended to bring enlightenment to humanity.

Did they try to sail the cape of good hope?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_of_Good_Hope

Mate, do you know that route? It's easy as fuck when you are a good sailor with a sound ship, a good crew & know how to supply your vessel for a few months of journey.
You just have to let yourself carry downwind.
I don't think that a maritime culture can be merrily sailing around all of europe and northafrica for several thousand years and not once getting into those steady and reliable tradewinds.
It even happens easily by accident if you are cruising the westafrican coast.
Canary settlers likely drifted off in storm from the morocco coast and were lucky enough to hit the Islands. If you are not, your next stop is the caribbean.

New Zealand, for example, was only reached by the Polynesians 700 years ago
>which makes it a discovery by primitive sailors

also:
>getting plants from a far away place is the same as inventing aviation
>saying myths may be associated with contact to a high civilization is the same as bringing ayys into the discussion

Watch Moana, bigot.

Even in modern times we dont really explore for the sake of exploring. We definetely have the technology to explore the space, and yet its 50 years ago we went to the moon, and even that was due to political circumstance (sticking it to the commies), and not for the sake of exploration.

Why dont we explore? Because exploring is extremely expensive. Sure, we could give NASA a budget of 1 trillion a year and within two or three decades we would have bases on the moon, mars and possibly other Planets. But that would mean that we would have to massively cut our military budget, social welfare, and other expenditures, and then suddenly exploring ranks pretty low on the priority list. Its basically the same for egypt and other civilizations. They basically had more pressing issues than financing exploration, especially super risky ones like crossing the atlantic.

Also, finding new land was not such a pressing issue because fertility rates werent high in earlier times. North america was only populated so quickly because of exploding birth rates in europe, who all migrated into the new lands of the US. Without such an exploding population you dont really have the incentive to find new "lebensraum".

Can you make a barrel? How about a boat? Could you, if I even gave you the tools required-without telling you how to use them-go out into the wilderness, gather the resources required and then while still in the wilderness construct something of use?

If yes, then so could they you retard
If no, then fuck off you retard

Once again - all the conjecture and evidence that it may have been possible given the right circumstances means nothing if there's no actual evidence of the voyage.

>b-but muh heiroglyphics
Heiroglyphics tend to be pretty famously misinterpreted to support whatever pseudo-historical theory is popular at the time. Do you have any evidence that actually supports your claim?

I will admit that there is no direct and conclusive evidence when you admit that there is the very real possibility that they did it anyway.
I didn't say anything about hieroglyths btw.