When were boats invented?

ByJesse Steinmetzpublished1 February 2026

The oldest physical boat is a canoe from roughly 10,000 years ago, but evidence suggests humans have been using watercraft for at least 50,000 years.

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Photograph a very old wooden canoe against a white background — The Pesse canoe is the oldest physical boat ever found. It dates to between 8250 and 7550 B.C. and is kept at theDrents Museum.(Image credit: Drents Museum;CC BY-NC 4.0)

Around 8000 B.C., a canoe carved from a single pine log came to rest in what is now the Netherlands. The roughly 10-foot-long (3 meters) boat wasn't discovered until 1955, whena road crew unearthed it from a peat bog near the village of Pesse. The artifact, now known as thePesse canoe, is the world's oldest physical example of a boat.

But there is significant indirect evidence that humans have been using boats for much longer than 10,000 years. So exactly when did humans invent boats?

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"We have solid evidence that humans were in modern-day Australia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago," Fauvelle told Live Science via email. "This would have required open-ocean seafaring between mainland Asia and thepaleocontinent of Sahul (of which Australia was then a part). Some sort of watercraft, therefore, must have been in use by at least circa 50,000 years ago."

The evidence in this case is not from the physical remains of an ancient boat. Instead, it comes fromDNA: A recent study analyzed almost 2,500 genomes from ancient and contemporary Aboriginal people throughout Australia and nearby countries, and investigated when Australian populations diverged from those on other continents. Their statistical models suggested thatnorthern Australia was first settled around 60,000 years ago. Those findings also line up with contemporaneoustools and pigments unearthed at Australian dig sites.

Colored map of Southeast Asia and Australia showing land in light brown and ocean in blue gradient. Highlights Sunda and Sahul shelves. — It's thought that ancient humans voyaged on boats from Southeast Asia to Australia between 50,000 and 65,000 years ago.(Image credit: By Arip Rahman 27/Shutterstock)

Other, more controversial archaeological evidence raises the possibility that humans were seafaring much earlier.

"There is some tantalizing evidence from Greece," Fauvelle said. "Paleolithic stone tools found on Crete have been dated based on their find-context to [at least]130,000 years ago. Some archaeologistshave disputed these dates, but if they hold up, it would mean that ancient humans would have traveled there by boat during the Middle Holocene." Crete is dozens of miles from mainland Greece (and has been an island forabout 5 million years).

Some experts would push back the clock on sea travel by hundreds of thousands of years, if not over a million, which would mean boats predate our species.

A1998 study led by archaeologist Michael Morwood dated stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Flores to about 800,000 years ago and concluded thatHomo erectus may have used watercraft to get there. Morwood later co-authored a2010 study that found tools from a different site in Flores may have originated 1.02 million years ago, if not earlier. And in a study published last year in the journalNature, a different research team proposed that pieces of stone tools found on the nearby Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest ancient human relativeswere crafting tools there at least 1.04 million years ago.

Still, there is plenty of debate about how and when ancient human relatives arrived on those islands.John Cherry, a professor emeritus of archaeology at Brown University, said one problem with the stone artifacts from Crete is that they are "surface finds," whichsit in plain sight above ground, as opposed to "stratified" objects, which are found in distinctsoil layers. They are also "lacking absoluteradiometric dates," which could further clarify when the tools were built. If the data in Crete "stand up to further scrutiny, or can be better dated," we can draw better conclusions, he told Live Science in an email.

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Jesse Steinmetz

Live Science Contributor

Jesse Steinmetz is a freelance reporter and public radio producer based in Massachusetts. His stories have covered everything from seaweed farmers to a minimalist smartphone company to the big business of online scammers and much more. His work has appeared in Inc. Magazine, Duolingo, CommonWealth Beacon, and the NPR affiliates GBH, WFAE and Connecticut Public, among other outlets. He holds a bachelors of arts degree in English at Hampshire College and another in music at Eastern Connecticut State University. When he isn't reporting, you can probably find him biking around Boston.

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