Ancient Seafaring Migrations

We know people in southeast Asia 70,000 years ago had boats they deliberately sailed out of sight of land: they colonized Australia. (Maybe via Timor, maybe Sulawesi, maybe both.) That they would have sailed wherever else they could, including along the Aleutians to North America, is the null hypothesis: you would need to demonstrate that they didn't, and show why not.The region had a million square miles of bottom land now under the sea. People lived there for tens of millennia, and wer

Don't you think it's surprising that some pocket of non-homo sapien humans didn't manage to survive on some remote island without getting found until at least after reasonable boats were invented (~5000 years ago).

People went to Australia and many remote islands in the oceans thousands of years ago. Probably had as good boats as the guys in the Mediterranean.

Some of them could have even sailed in the opposite direction to Oceania, There are still indigenous people living in complete isolation on islands like Sentinelese[1].[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinelese

Boats, obviously. But the settlers themselves were dead. Their descendants may have had oral traditions about how their ancestors reached the island but I don't think we have any evidence that they constituted a seafaring civilization. Those weren't really possible until the invention of reliable navigational instruments such as the compass.

Everything suggests this is what happened. Polynesian people had for centuries boats that could make such voyages. It’s possible the original settlers got lucky/unlucky but the technology needed for it existed for them.There’s also plenty of history showing smaller pacific islands that are colonized, so it looks like living of fish and the sea is possible and not a problem.There’s plenty of information about this in Wikipedia. Alternatively, you can watch Moana.

Not that I am promoting the theory as true, but to steel man it: the same way that you find evidence of Vikings in Italy, or Tamils in Australia before colonization from Europe. I.e. that people traveled and we don't at this time have a clear idea exactly when and where they traveled, but more and more we are understanding that our modern perspective has grossly underestimated people of the past.

Much evidence of hunter gather population for tens of thousands of years before the arrival of "civilization", by boat, after it was submerged.

The current DNA evidence points to the aboriginal people of Taiwan as being the likely source of the original polynesians, likely they spread across the northern Pacific, as far as the Americas, then back again to New Zealand arriving around 900AD (the last major inhabitable place on earth to be discovered by humans)

Always wondered why this is such a surprise. Getting around the planet, especially over very long time periods, is just not that hard. We're stuck in a mentality that says long distance travel was impossible prior to Columbus. But realize he was just the guy who traveled and came BACK. To migrate over long distances you don't by definition need to return, so the people you left have no idea where you went. Also you have to have a motivation to tell people where you went. Supposedly the