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History of Technology 2: Early Boats 25 Views
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Description:
Early boats may have been leaky and impossible to steer, but they sure beat walking. Well...until they got caught in a surprise waterfall. No one likes a surprise waterfall.
Transcript
- 00:04
Walking is exhausting seriously come find us after a day at the [Footage of people walking around a city]
- 00:09
theme park our dogs are barking, and that's not just a modern problem at some
- 00:14
point our ancestors got tired of walking too. No word on whether or not it passes
- 00:18
in a theme park. Maybe they noticed logs floating down the river and were like
- 00:23
"hey I can do that" well however it happened about 50,000 years ago people [Prehistoric man watches log float down a river]
Full Transcript
- 00:27
around the world started inventing ways to move on the water. The very first boats
- 00:32
were probably rafts of logs lashed together with vines, bark or leather.
- 00:36
Our buddy Oog, the caveman probably saw some logs going on down the river and
- 00:42
got the bright idea to tie them all together and just sit on them. And sure they
- 00:46
couldn't be steered and they probably leaked a little and they weren't great in the [Oog sat on a leaking raft]
- 00:50
rapids. But coasting down a river sure had to beat walking a few hundred
- 00:54
miles, until the waterfall came.. You alright there Oog? We're sure he's fine ... The next and
- 01:00
probably most celebrated boat was the dugout canoe. Well to make one of these we
- 01:05
started with a single large tree trunk then we used small controlled fires to
- 01:10
burn out the center of the log, finally we scrape away the charred bits with an Adze [Prehistoric man setting a log on fire]
- 01:14
which is just a sharp rock on a stick.. We end up with a narrow hollowed-out boat
- 01:20
that is maneuverable and a water tight and with such a successful design that
- 01:25
it was built by human being all over the world for literally thousands of years.
- 01:29
All the cool kids had one, and if you still had a bunch of blogs tied together
- 01:33
well then you were so prehistoric even the dinosaurs were laughing at you. [People in boats overtake Oog on a raft]
- 01:37
And sure canoes took skill and tools to make, but they weren't super rare way
- 01:42
back in ancient times. Archaeologists have found dugout canoes in both the
- 01:47
Netherlands and in Nigeria. At 8,000 years old they're the oldest canoes on record.
- 01:52
This means different groups of people separately came up with the same kind of
- 01:56
canoes which just goes show you, there are no new ideas. About 5,000 years ago [Two people in the same canoe labelled Dutch and Nigerian]
- 02:01
after the canoe was invented a new seafaring innovation appeared. With this
- 02:05
new technology Europeans would explore the known world, Indians would build vast
- 02:10
trading empires and Africans would head out for the new world. Well what was this
- 02:15
magical technology mm-hmm the sail. Oh for now don't run away with the idea
- 02:20
that sales immediately made the canoe and paddle unimportant, no way. Well sails
- 02:25
in the ancient world weren't all that great, in the beginning they were about [Boat with a sail sinks]
- 02:28
as effective as tying a sheet to a stick and putting it in our canoe. Well human
- 02:32
muscle power was still the name of the game for a long time. Even really clever
- 02:37
and advanced ships like Greek galleys and Viking Drakkars had to be rode along by
- 02:42
rows of sweaty dudes, and no deodorant had not been invented yet. It would have made those [Vikings in a Drakkar]
- 02:48
voyages way better for everyone involved. [Man smells his armpit and collapses]
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