Archaeologica.org

The First Boat People concerns how people travelled across the world to Australia in the Pleistocene. It traces movement from Africa to Australia, offering a new view of population growth at that time,

Therefore, once on Flores, Homo Erectus could move on another 600 kms without getting his feet wet. ...therefore, Homo Erectus's ability to make such a journey could have put him in East Timor.

Ishtar wrote:

Therefore, once on Flores, Homo Erectus could move on another 600 kms without getting his feet wet. ...therefore, Homo Erectus's ability to make such a journey could have put him in East Timor.

But does he still have get across that deep water channel?

However, archaeologists have found precious few remains of prehistoric rafts and boats. The oldest such finds, including wooden canoes and paddles, come from northern Europe and date to at most 9,000 years ago.

"A quantum leap in cognition and technology occurred around 900,000 years ago," Bednarik says. "All the traits that fundamentally define modern humans were first developed by Homo erectus."

Our Stone Age ancestors were certainly smart enough to have traversed a nautical obstacle course such as the Lombok Strait, Bednarik contended in the April Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Findings by researchers working in Asia and Africa suggest that rock art, decorative beads, engraved stones, and hunting spears all originated at least several hundred thousand years before the appearance of H. sapiens. Such accomplishments would require that individuals speak to one another and assign abstract meanings to various objects and symbols, in Bednarik's opinion.

He suspects that genetic and cultural evolution played out slowly among human ancestors over the past 2 million years. Groups that moved across Africa and Asia interbred to some extent and passed cultural innovations back and forth.

In this continental melting pot, a hazy biological boundary separated H. erectus from H. sapiens. About 1 million years ago, Stone Age Asians probably congregated near coasts, and their fishing rafts were eventually adapted for sea travel. Remains of these shore inhabitants would have since become submerged and so are unavailable to archaeologists.

Some scientists suspect that small numbers of Stone Age folk accidentally drifted as far as Flores after climbing onto thick mats of vegetation that sometimes form near the Southeast Asian coast.

Minimalist wrote:

Some scientists suspect that small numbers of Stone Age folk accidentally drifted as far as Flores after climbing onto thick mats of vegetation that sometimes form near the Southeast Asian coast.

I wonder if those "scientists" put any thought into what would make someone climb onto a mat of "vegetation" and set out to sea? One would need one hell of a reason in my book.