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Five paddlers completed a journey from Taiwan to Yonaguni Island, across some of the world’s fastest oceanic currents, without modern navigation tools.Credit: Kaifuet al./Science Advances(CC-By-ND)
Archaeologists had previously ‘drawn lines’ to show how Stone Age seafarers could have discovered the southernmost islands of Japan, travelling northeast from Taiwan. But Yousuke Kaifu wanted to “know the story behind those lines”.
In a detailed re-enactment of the perilous journey, Kaifu, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University Museum of the University of Tokyo, and his collaborators demonstrated how Palaeolithic people could have travelled huge distances with the tools, materials, techniques and navigational skills available at the time. They described their feat inScience Advanceson 25 June1.
The study highlights that “these journeys are definitely much more epic than we give them credit for”, says Eleanor Scerri, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany.
Palaeolithic sites in the Ryukyu Islands — a chain that extends for around 1,200 kilometres and includes Okinawa — contain human remains and stone tools dating to some 30,000 years ago. This suggests that the islands’ early settlers navigated there successfully from Taiwan by crossing the Kuroshio, one of the world’s strongest ocean currents.
But exactly how they did this remains a mystery. Any boat carcases have long since rotted away, so researchers instead try to recreate the voyage experimentally, using the kinds of tool and material that humans were known to have access to at the time. Kaifu and his team have been trying to travel from Taiwan to the Ryukyu Islands since 2013, partly financing their research through crowdfunding. Their first attempts, using rafts made of reeds or bamboo, were unsuccessful.
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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02008-9
Kaifu, Y.et al.Sci. Adv.11, eadv5507 (2025).
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