Free Atlantic by Simon Winchester

romance of finding potsherds and pieces of decorative artwork remains, of course, but for speedy determination of the spread of humankind, no better way can be devised than the computerized parsing of the genetic record.
    Communities were already forming on the Atlantic’s east side while native newcomers were still nervously pushing their way through the woodlands in the west. The first Neolithic peoples in the Levant had already created their world’s first town, Jericho. By now all the world’s peoples were Homo sapiens; no other human kind had made it beyond the end of the Paleolithic epoch—and their advances, seen from this end of the telescope of time, seem to have taken place at an almost exponential rate. When Jericho was first founded—and this is when the western Atlantic was still essentially unpopulated—its inhabitants were busy carving stones and raising millet, sorghum, and einkorn wheat. Just a few thousand years later, when the first skin-wearing and shivering Ojibwe and Cree and Eskimos were doing their artless best to create the first hardscrabble settlements in the American north, men in the Fertile Crescent and beyond, in places as far away as Ireland, were already throwing pots, were raising dogs, pigs, and sheep, had created from stone the adze and the sickle blade, had built tombs and henges, had used salt to preserve their food, and were on the verge of smelting metals.
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    Moreover, these easterners had also made their first boats. Very early settlers in Holland and France had first carved or scorched the interior of fallen trees as much as ten thousand years ago, producing dugouts that they used to navigate their rivers and swamps and cross some of the less formidable estuaries. But these craft were really just canoes, at once both unstable and elephantine, and without keels, sails, rudders, or the kind of freeboard necessary for even the most limited push into the sea. It was to be the Crescent, once again, where the first major advance occurred: in Kuwait, two thousand years later, there appeared a proper sailing craft, made of rushes and reeds and lacquered with bitumen, that was capable of journeying at least through the tricky and unpredictable waters of the Red Sea and perhaps beyond.
    Oman also had such a boat, and in 2005 a very eager Omani sultan sponsored a crew of half a dozen to pilot a replica from Muscat to the Indian coast of Gujarat. The journey was to have been 360 miles, but the bitumen must have leaked, because the reeds in the hull became waterlogged three miles off the Arabian coast. The tiny craft promptly sank and everyone had to be rescued by a ship from the Royal Oman Navy.
    5. SAILINGS
    The Phoenicians were the first to build proper ships and to brave the rough waters of the Atlantic.
    To be sure, the Minoans before them traded with great vigor and defended their Mediterranean trade routes with swift and vicious naval force. Their ships—built with tools of sharp-edged bronze—were elegant and strong: they were made of cypress trees, sawn in half and lapped together, with white-painted and sized linen stretched across the planks, and with a sail suspended from a mast of oak, and oars to supplement their speed. But they worked only by day, and they voyaged only between the islands within a few days’ sailing of Crete; never once did any Minoan dare venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules, into the crashing waves of the Sea of Perpetual Gloom.
    The Minoans, like most of their rival thalassocracies, accepted without demur the legends that enfolded the Atlantic, the stories and the sagas that conspired to keep even the boldest away. The waters beyond the Pillars, beyond the known world, beyond what the Greeks called the oekumen, the inhabited earth, were simply too fantastic and frightful to even think of braving. There might have been some engaging marvels: close inshore, the Gardens of the Hesperides, and somewhat farther beyond, that greatest of all