The Pesse canoe
A hollowed pine log from the Netherlands is the oldest boat ever found.
- When
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
The Pesse canoe, radiocarbon dated to around 8000 BCE, is a three-metre dugout made from a single Scots pine, cut and hollowed with flint tools and fire. Replicas float and are paddleable, which had been doubted. Boats certainly existed for tens of thousands of years before it — Australia was reached by sea at 65,000 years ago — but wood rots, and this is the earliest one that survived.